Total War: Warhammer III brings fresh fodder for starved lovers of the RTS genre. Creative Assembly, or just "CA," are masterminds at releasing strategy games, so expectations are high, no doubt. So far, I find the game fun and engaging, with decent complexity. Still, if you're not into RTS games, TW: WH3 is not for you unless you're into the Warhammer lore, but that probably means you've already played Total War: Warhammer 1 and 2. If you're new to the series, there's a prologue that will familiarize you with the game's mechanics even though it's sometimes a bit dumbed down. Sounds interesting? Check out the various reviews and videos.

Somewhat surprising is that Creative Assembly is using the Total War 3 engine for this title—I would have expected something new. What's even more surprising is that Warhammer 3 uses DirectX 11 exclusively. The engine does support DirectX 12—just add "-dx12" to the command line, but DX12 is pretty much completely broken. There have been sporadic reports that on some systems, DX12 still got enabled by default; if that's the case for you, "-dx11" will help, or manually edit the preferences file in %APPDATA%\The Creative Assembly\Warhammer3\scripts.

When I first started playing the game at Ultra settings without looking at framerates, I was pleasantly surprised. For an RTS game, this looked nice, not "2022 next-gen," but definitely better than most strategy games out there. While graphics are arguably not the most important aspect of the genre, better eye-candy is always welcome. Take a look at our screenshots: lighting and shadows are topnotch. Textures and ground complexity are a bit on the low-quality side, though. Character animations in cutscenes are clunky, but storytelling in battles is certainly not the most important aspect of the game. In "campaign view," the voiceovers are of good production value.

Let's talk about performance now. We tested using a custom battle, as the integrated benchmark is a little bit on the light side, especially the beginning runs at very high FPS that isn't really representative of the "typical" gaming experience you should expect. Our benchmark is not a worst-case, either. On some maps, there are lots of frame drops during gameplay, and a little bit of stuttering, too, from time to time. For 1080p Full HD at 60 FPS, you should have an RX 6700 XT or RTX 3060 Ti at least, and for fluid 1440p, an RX 6800 XT, RTX 3070 Ti, or RTX 2080 Ti is close enough with 58.6 FPS. For fluid 4K, you'll have to wait for faster hardware as not even the mighty RTX 3090 gets 60 FPS and is rather far from that goal with just 44.7 FPS. The RX 6900 XT, AMD's fastest card, only manages 35.5 FPS. No, there is no secret always-on ray tracing in Total War: Warhammer III as it's a DirectX 11 game.

These requirements are SUPER high, and totally unreasonable given the graphics offered. Sure, there's lots of units on-screen, but other than that, I'm not seeing anything we haven't seen in other titles, with much better performance. On Reddit, some conspiracy theories tout that the reason for the low FPS is the Denuvo copy protection. Apparently, press review builds came without Denuvo and performance was much better. I'm not convinced of that yet, as the Denuvo developers are very clear in their instructions on how to properly implement their protection with minimal effect on performance. Maybe some kind of bug that sneaked into the final release build will be fixed down the road. Either way, let's hope Creative Assembly can identify the problem and fix it. We used the latest game-ready drivers from both AMD and NVIDIA for all our testing, so I doubt we can expect more optimizations from the GPU vendor side.

Until then, you can only reduce details, which is easy as there are lots of graphics options. The difference between the graphics presets is quite reasonable, and the FPS gains are good. For example, going from Ultra to High will give you around 20% higher FPS, and going to Medium even adds +50% to the framerates. Once again, for a strategy game, graphics aren't the most important thing, but it's still sad that developers (of all genres) keep releasing such unoptimized titles.

VRAM usage, on the other hand, is very reasonable. Even at 4K, only 8 GB are used, and at 1440p, you'll be fine with a 6 GB card. For 1080p, Full HD a 4 GB framebuffer might be a little bit small, as we've measured allocations to go slightly above that. If you turn down a few settings, this won't be a problem, though.