Total War Three Kingdoms Denuvo Benchmarked

Methodology

In order to understand how we will perform these tests, it’s important to know the circumstances under which the will be conducted. It is, after all, important to ensure that the tests themselves are not only fair, but they provide results which can provide a valid comparison.

So, in regards to our base system. Both versions of the game were tested on the exact same system which had the following specifications.

• AMD 1600X Processor
• Nvidia 980 Ti Graphics Card
• 16GB 3200mhz RAM
• 500GB NVMe Storage

During the tests, we ensured that no background operations or applications were running. The internet was disconnected (to ensure no subtle O/S downloads) and Steam was running offline.

Benchmarks

Fortunately, Total War Three Kingdoms comes built-in with two benchmarking programs. One which simulates the battle mode and the other which simulates the campaign map. Once completed, these benchmarks provided results based on the average frames per second at which the game operated.

As such, we ran both of these benchmarks (on each version of the game) using the following graphics settings.

• 1080p at base ‘Medium’ settings
• 1440p at base ‘High’ settings
• 1440p at base ‘Ultra’ settings

Benchmarks would’ve been run at 4K, however, Total War Three Kingdoms is a rather demanding mistress. As such, given that we wanted fairer results that would run acceptably on our test system, we decided to not test at this level.

For your reference, we have included videos of both of the games benchmarks running above and below, although it should be noted that these videos were not recorded by ourselves.