Total Warhammer 3 Optimization Guide: Tweak Settings, Get Better FPS!

In a totally unexpected and completely unforeseen turn of fate, the latest (visually incredible, might we add) Total War game doesn't run all that well by default. And, to be fair, there are necessary optimizations that Creative Assembly and SEGA need to get to, for sure, but we've got something to help you until that happens. That's right - this Total Warhammer 3 optimization guide aims to help you get the game to run as well as humanly possible.

Down below, we've prepared a comprehensive overview of graphics settings and options you may wish to play around with. We'll discuss which settings you need to crank down, and which you may want to keep at their highest. It's not quite as straightforward as one might think, you see.

Besides, depending on your PC, you might not want to nuke the game's graphics all the way down. This guide will, then, assist you in finding just the right ratio of graphics and performance to enjoy Total War: Warhammer 3 in all its glory. Or, at least, most of it.

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The Basics

As we've implied at the start, Total War: Warhammer 3 is not an easy game to run. With hundreds of units fighting simultaneously across truly massive battlefields, the minimum system requirements seem like an extremely optimistic predicament from Creative Assembly.

Still, it pays to go over them one more time, we feel. The recommended ones, at the very least.

Recommended PC Hardware for Total Warhammer 3

According to the earliest benchmarks, even a more powerful gaming rig than this one will have serious trouble maintaining 60 FPS. Even at 1080p! We're not entirely sure whether to attribute that to early-launch growing pains or to backend visual improvements, but the game is hard on PC hardware - that much we know for a fact.

Now, it's worth keeping in mind that framerate isn't the be-all, end-all for a Total War game. This is a grand strategy title, after all. Still, not being able to keep up with the bare minimum of 60 FPS at a relatively low resolution doesn't bode well for people with lower-specced rigs.

Thankfully, there are things to do to get better FPS across the board. No goat sacrifices this time, we promise. Some graphics settings tweaks are all we need! And, of course, an up-to-date graphics driver.

Should I tune my Windows Settings, too?

Though it certainly is possible that your operating system is so heavily borked that it's affecting your game performance, the odds are that this isn't the case. Modern versions of Windows work way better than it ever did in the days of XP and Win7, and in our experience, you shouldn't need to go out of your way to make system-level changes to keep the pace if the rest of your PC is up-to-par.

However, if you really feel the need to go all out, we recommend you follow our low-end PC optimization guide first. If none of that helps - as unlikely as that might be - we recommend only following Microsoft's official guidelines so that you don't bork anything yourself. Start with the option to enable Game Mode if you're on Win11, for example.

Broadly speaking, Windows settings haven't generally been a problem for some time now. Your graphics driver, however, might be! And on that, it's worth pointing out that you can tweak your graphics card driver settings to some extent, too. Before doing so, we do need to recommend you update your graphics card driver, to boot, as you may end up getting mixed results instead.

Total Warhammer 3 Optimization Guide: Get Better FPS!

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As we've explained time and again, not every graphics setting carries the same performance penalty. Low-end PC gamers will know what we're talking about! While the seemingly obvious thing to do - if you're having framerate issues - may be to turn down everything, this is never ideal.

Instead, the way to go is to tweak each setting according to its rendering cost. This sounds more complex than it actually is, we promise. To keep things neat and simple, we've singled out a few Total Warhammer 3 graphics settings you're going to want to reduce, and a few of them that you should keep cranked up.

That way, the final result will be a game that runs better, and without looking like it had come out 20 years ago.

One thing to remember is that the default Windows Task Manager will be a key feature in this optimization process. Being familiar with the Task Manager is a good idea in general, too, so you're going to want to familiarize yourself with it if you haven't done so yet. For a primer on the Task Manager, look no further than How-To Geek!

Total War: Warhammer 3 Graphics Settings to Turn Down

The first order of business is - as you'd expect - turning things down! It should go without saying that you will lose out on most of the game's admittedly incredible graphics by turning these settings down. Depending on your tolerance for jaggies and muddy texture work, this may be a deal-breaker. However, it costs nothing to give these tweaks a shot, right?

Besides, you can always slowly crank things back up for screenshots and whatnot. In fact, we recommend you do so when performance tweaks and fixes are deployed in future updates.

Either way, there are four major performance hogs in Total Warhammer 3:

We'll explain what each of these graphics settings does in short, and you can decide whether you're okay with turning them down on a case-by-case basis.

Shadow Detail Setting

A simple and straightforward option. Turning this down will incur lower-resolution shadows and render a fewer number of them.

Anti-Aliasing Setting

Turning this down will disable edge smoothing algorithms, but the fall-back method is to choose the FXAA option over anything else. It's the cheapest AA there is, and it won't cause a massive performance drain.

VFX Detail Setting

The biggest difference-making option on this list. Turning down VFX detail will disable or simplify visual effects from spells and the like, massively improving the framerate along the way.

Lighting Quality Setting

What it says on the tin: tweaks the quality and number of light sources during combat sequences.

So, to summarize, you'll be giving up shading and shadow-casting capabilities for the most part. For gameplay-oriented gamers, this shouldn't be a huge issue on its own. It's worth remembering, however, that reducing unit detail complexity, disabling depth-of-field, and other such thingamajigs will net you even better performance gains. These four are just proven to be the biggest performance drains at this time.

Here's a shortlist of other options you may also wish to consider disabling, but which aren't quite as heavy as the four featured above:

Total War: Warhammer 3 Graphics Settings to Keep High

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Admittedly shorter, there does in fact exist a list of settings you generally should keep at a higher option. That way, even if you tweak down all the things we mentioned in the previous section, the game still won't look downright horrible. Worse, yes, but not the worst.

Here are the items we recommend keeping at a high(ish) setting:

Most of these are pretty self-explanatory, really. There are a few caveats to keep in mind, however, and we'll explain these below.

Texture Quality Setting

While texture quality shouldn't be causing performance issues on its own, do keep in mind that this particular setting is very tied to the amount of VRAM your graphics card has access to. If you have a reasonably powerful GPU, keep this setting as high as possible. Note that it may cause problems if you're still stuck with an older GPU, however, such as the VRAM-limited GTX 1050 or 1050Ti.

Sharpening Setting

Sharpening is a matter of taste. The performance cost sharpening incurs is downright negligible, but you're going to want to tweak it to your own liking. It's easy to end up with a dreadfully over-sharpened image, so be conservative when applying this slider. Ideally, it should make the image look significantly better without overly highlighting the object and character edges.

Texture Filtering

Another cheap option, this feature is never a big performance drain, and our advice would be to keep it up. Otherwise, far-away textures will look muddy and flat, for the lack of a better term. Ideally, it should be at 16X at all times. But, if you want to be really careful with lost FPS, turning it down to 8X is usually the winning combo.

What About Resolution Scale Options, Though?

Total Warhammer 3 is one of the relatively few examples of games that are extremely CPU bound in most respects. Much like the upcoming Starfield, for example, your processor makes a huge difference in how the game runs, and though your GPU does play a role here, it's not as huge of a deal as you'd think.

To that end, your screen resolution and/or resolution scale won't play as big of a role as they would in a GPU-heavy title. The right way of going about tweaking this particular setting is to set your resolution scale to a level where it doesn't meaningfully affect your FPS. From that point onwards, you'll want to tweak other settings, instead.

Closing Thoughts

We hope this Total Warhammer 3 optimization guide helps you get the most out of your gaming PC! There's no doubt that Creative Assembly is already working on performance tweaks and fixes that will deliver the kind of framerate we had come to expect from their games, but in the meantime, the advice we've provided here ought to help, even if only a little bit. Just remember that your resolution scale settings might not have as big of an effect in this particular game as they otherwise might.

If you'd like to read more about Total War: Warhammer 3, we've got oodles of related content available here at 2Game. As a starting point, however, we recommend the appropriately-titled Total Warhammer 3 starter guide! Can't go wrong with that one, we feel.

Though Total War: Warhammer 3 hasn't had a perfect launch, we're all but sure that it's going to make its way to our list of SEGA's greatest games of all time.

That being said, Creative Assembly is nothing if not reliable. The future of Total Warhammer is bright, we're absolutely positive about that.

In a totally unexpected and completely unforeseen turn of fate, the latest (visually incredible, might we add) Total War game doesn’t run all that well by default. And, to be fair, there are necessary optimizations that Creative Assembly and SEGA need to get to, for sure, but we’ve got something to help you until that happens. […]