Empire Total War No High Graphics
Baldovino Caya
The purpose of this graphic pack, is to bring a complete, unified end to the aging graphics of Empire Total War. To introduce a new setting to the stage of Empire's ambience. Bringing remastered graphic detail to both the battlefields and campaigns of the early and late 18th century.
Total War title's graphic environments from throughout the saga are appropriated into high definition environments with a momentous number of possible sky variations with a multitude number of added textures to enumerate into what is, one of the largest graphic projects of Empire Total War to date.
The latest update brings added features to rival the graphics of major overhauls. The goal was to end the monopoly major overhauls had over light setups in terms of graphics. Here we will be going over what to expect in this update.
Taken in present day Germany, in the province of Saxony. Here you may recognize Napoleon Environments, but you may also notice the sky is unique. Rome Total War II cloud sets and flare effects have been fully integrated with natural lighting taken in effect, thanks to the developers at the Creative Assembly.
Lighting and shader effects have also been introduced. Lighting effects influences the way light is cast onto objects and depends on the type of environment. Shader effects will give a new set of graphical effects. Here you can see SSAO, which is more enhanced from the vanilla version. You may also notice, the High Dynamic Range and the Depth of Field from the graphics menu is effected as well.
Taken in Berar and Spain. The campaign environment features a wider color range that helps define the terrain. Shadows stand out more and that are of higher quality due to the position of the sun in the campaign environment.
Images Captured at 1920 x 1080 on a FHD monitor that can display a 10,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio with The highest in-game Settings possible in Empire Total War all with the Terrestria Orbem graphic mod enabled
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Empire Total War HD: Terrestria Orbem graphics mod pushes the game's graphic environment to the near limit. Graphic contents are brought from modern total war games, so if you are running on the highest settings that Empire has to offer, make sure you are running a fairly recent system that can handle the tasks given to it by this mod. The in-game graphics settings might each yield different varying results with a higher frames per second toll than in vanilla due to the scope of the changes
Playing a Total War game has always been a bit of an uphill battle on PC. With their detailed maps and densely-populated armies, they're some of the most graphically-intensive games around today - and if you've read any of the graphics card reviews I've done here at RPS, you'll know that Total War: Warhammer II is one of the regular games I use for benchmarking. Well, now we have a new big Total War in the form of Total War: Three Kingdoms, and man alive it's one fierce opponent on the old graphics performance front.
But worry not, PC foot soldiers, as I've gone and hurled every last one of today's best graphics cards (plus a couple of oldies) into battle to see what kind of performance you can expect from Total War: Three Kingdoms, as well as how to get the best settings possible to help bring that elusive frame rate of 60fps within reach. Together, we are stronger. Now we fight!
Just before we charge into hundreds of very sharp spears, though, let's remind ourselves of Total War: Three Kingdoms' PC requirements. As you can see below, Creative Assembly have outlined a number of different recommendations this time, but you'll still need a pretty beefy system to hit that 60fps sweet spot. Their minimum specifications, for instance, is only expected to produce around 25-35fps on both the campaign map and battle scenarios on Low graphics quality at a resolution of 1280x720.
Their recommended spec, meanwhile, is aimed at those playing on High at 1920x1080, which Creative Assembly says should give you a frame rate between 45-55fps in the above scenarios. To get a solid 60fps on Ultra settings at 1920x1080, however, you'll need that bottom specification - although if my results are anything to go by, I think you'll also be able to get away with having a Core i5 / GTX 1070 system if Ultra settings are an absolute must for you.
As always, the aim here is to get you playing Total War: Three Kingdoms at 60fps at 1920x1080, 2560x1440 and 4K. That's a pretty tall order for some graphics cards, but the good news is that Creative Assembly have put a lot of work into making the game more performance-efficient this time round, particularly when it comes to their frame-melting anti-aliasing effects - the stuff wot makes all those sharp edges and pointy weapons look like proper, solid lines instead of jagged, pixellated staircases - but more on that in a sec.
To test each card, I use the game's built-in benchmarking tool, specifically the battle benchmark. This simulates a massive fight between two opposing clans, showing each army rushing across a wide, open plain surrounding by forests and tall mountains while chucking massive great fire bombs at each other in between volleys of arrows. There's a lot going on, and it's a good test of how well your PC will cope with the game's big fights.
There's also a campaign benchmark that comes with the game, which sees the camera swooping through a simulated campaign map, but I found the average frame rates it spat out were roughly the same as what I saw over in the battle benchmark. As a result, the speeds I've laid out in the links above should be broadly representative of what you'll see in both types of scenario.
I stuck with the game's four main quality presets (Low, Medium, High and Ultra) during my testing, but as you can see from the image below, there are plenty of options available in the Graphics settings menu's Advanced tab to help improve your PC's performance if you're finding it's struggling to keep a steady frame rate (click to expand).
Interestingly, Texture Quality is always set to Ultra regardless of whether you're playing on High, Medium or Low, but the rest of the game's settings all drop down accordingly with their corresponding preset. This helps maintain a certain level of quality when you're getting stuck in with Total War's big battlefields, but I'd argue that other settings such as Terrain Detail and Grass Detail are just as important when it comes to keeping Three Kingdoms looking its best.
As you can see below, for example, the game's Low preset looks like your warriors are charging across a field of Vaseline when the camera's zoomed out, which just looks a bit odd when all your soldiers are detailed up to the nines. Sure, skimping on environmental details like this allows the frame rate to stay nice and high, but it's far from ideal. Medium is better, but that, too, is verges on looking a little underwhelming at times, especially with its reduced unit sizes. As a result, I'd say Medium is probably the minimum quality you should be aiming for here.
Fortunately, all but two graphics cards I've tested (Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and AMD's Radeon R9 270) were able to run Three Kingdoms at 60fps on Medium at 1920x1080 without much trouble at all. The GTX 1050 Ti wasn't far off 60fps, all told, but the R9 270 really had a bit of a tough time with it. As a result, older graphics cards of a similar vintage to the R9 270 may well have to make do with running the game at lower resolutions in order to push into higher quality settings.
High and Ultra settings, on the other hand, are likely to be where the real battles will be fought in Three Kingdoms, as it wasn't until I got up to the GTX 1660 that I started to see a consistent 60fps average on High. For 60fps on Ultra, you're looking at either the GTX 1070 or RTX 2060. As such, this is where I've focused most of my attention - how to get the best settings on High and Ultra without compromising too much on what makes those settings so pretty.
As a case study, I took my 6GB GTX 1060 and tried to get it running as close to 60fps as possible on Ultra at 1920x1080, and High at 2560x1440. The GTX 1060 can already hit a smooth average of 58fps on High at 1080p and Medium at 1440p, so I wanted to see if it was possible to get it running on the next graphics setting up without suffering a huge drop in the overall frame rate.
The biggest thing you can do is to set the Anti-aliasing to FXAA. Creative Assembly said in their PC requirements article at the top there that they've made great strides with their frame rate-guzzling anti-aliasing tech this time round - so much so that they're calling their top-end TAA (or temporal anti-aliasing) setting their 'headline technical feature'. It's "very performance-efficient and looks great," according to Creative Assembly, and it's allowed them to drop their multi-sample AA (or MSAA) altogether. Their "most performance-efficient" AA, however, is their fast approximate, or "FX" AA - and it really does show.
It may not be "as visually clean as TAA", say CA, but when dropping down to FXAA saw a boost of almost 10fps when I re-ran the battle benchmark with my GTX 1060 on Ultra at 1920x1080, I think I'll take those slightly 'dirtier' lines, thanks - especially if it means an average frame rate of 51fps instead of 43fps.
Switching off SSAO also helped push that figure even higher - up to a near-perfect average of 58fps, with highs of 67fps and lows of just 52fps. That's a pretty decent gain, if you ask me, and lowering the Texture Filtering to Anisotropic x8 will nab you another extra frame to push the average to 59fps, too. That's pretty much the same speed I got on the default High setting at 1920x1080 - and that's without compromising on any of the other environmental details, too.