The top image above is from Warhammer III’s battle benchmark, the middle image is from Troy’s battle benchmark, and the bottom image is from Troy’s siege benchmark. Let the numbers below speak for themselves: CPU utilization is WORSE than that of Warhammer 2, with occasional huge spikes in CPU usage and simultaneously GPU utilization dropping to 20-30% in battles. So Troy brought massive engine optimizations to the table, yet Warhammer III seemingly fails to incorporate all of them. As a result, on my Ryzen 9 5900X and RX 6900 XT PC, battles tend to run between 80-100 FPS in Troy, compared to 30-45 FPS in Warhammer II on Ultra settings at 3840 x 2160 resolution. On the other hand, Troy features significantly improved multithreading, with even 12 core/24 thread CPUs delivering considerable performance benefits over 8 core/16 thread models. The predecessor to this game, Warhammer II, is barely multithreaded like most games, so the performance is terrible in large battles, and still sub 60 FPS in moderately sized battles at 1440p and above on any system.
Warhammer III is not the buggiest release ever, but in my > 20 years of gaming I have never seen a new mainstream game lower the bar this much technically. The biggest problem is not even Denuvo, which according to some reviewers who had pre-Denuvo versions of the game, causes significant performance penalties. The biggest problems with this game’s release aren’t bugs, nor is it the upcoming blood DLC which is stupid but nothing new. Personally, I was most eager to experience the game after its Mortal Empires and faction DLC updates, integration with content from the previous games, and I was really looking forward to playing this game with the massive engine improvements shown in A Total War Saga: TROY – namely multithreading, which results in Troy running up to several times faster than other DX11-later era Total War games. Total War: Warhammer III is a game many of us were anticipating.