Introduction

Homeworld 3, the highly anticipated sequel developed by Blackbird Interactive and published by Gearbox Publishing, propels players into a mesmerizing interstellar odyssey. Thanks to a 3D strategy view, it promises breathtaking visuals and immersive gameplay. As players command fleets across the vast expanse of space, they'll navigate through detailed environments and engage in epic battles that push the limits of strategic prowess.


Homeworld 3 uses Epic's Unreal Engine 4, which is a huge improvement over the in-house engine used for Homeworld 2. While the engine is not the newest Unreal Engine 5, you still get support for DirectX 12, with optional ray tracing.

In terms of upscalers, almost everything is included. There's support for NVIDIA DLSS 2 Super Resolution, AMD FSR 2 Super Resolution and Intel XeSS. Frame Generation isn't available.

This benchmark review will evaluate the performance of Homeworld 3 on a wide selection of modern graphics cards, show image quality comparisons and look at what's required in terms of VRAM usage.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at maximum settings, with upscaling and frame generation disabled. The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

The in-game graphics settings are a long list on a single page, I combined it into two images.

• Homeworld 3 supports running windowed, borderless and fullscreen
• You may disable V-Sync
• An optional FPS counter in the top left corner can be enabled
• The FPS limit in-game and in the menus can be set separately, there is no hidden FPS cap, but the game is quite CPU limited
• Motion blur can be disabled completely

• The "Upscale algorithm" menu has three options: "Spatial," "TAAU," "DLSS," "FSR," and "XeSS". Spatial is just bilinear upscaling and looks terrible, TAAU is Unreal Engine's own temporal upscaler
• The Resolution scale menu provides the usual "Ultra Quality," "Quality," "Balanced," "Performance" and "Ultra Performance." On top of that you get a "Custom" setting that lets you set the percentage freely between 33% and 95%, and 100%
• Besides that there are many options to further improve performance and fine-tune everything
• At the end of the list is "Ray Tracing," which renders shadows with RT instead of cascaded shadow maps.