How to improve FPS in Total War: Pharaoh (PC)
Total War: Pharaoh brings Creative Assembly's formula to Bronze Age Egypt, combining a turn-based campaign map with real-time battles where thousands of individual soldiers clash on screen. It runs on Total War's proprietary engine, polished over more than a decade of entries. The technical challenge isn't so much on the graphics side as in simultaneously calculating AI, formations, and pathfinding for every unit on the battlefield.
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Calculations based on our FPS model combined with the % gain of each setting (measured in public benchmarks).
1. Quick wins (no visual loss)
Start here. Each one adds a little, but together they give +66% free FPS.
Unit Size
This is the single most decisive setting in the game: it defines how many individual soldiers make up each unit, and therefore how many agents the CPU must simulate in every battle.
Battle Environment Quality
Controls the geometric and effects detail level of terrain, buildings, and destructible elements in battles.
Shadow Quality
Dynamic shadows for thousands of simultaneous soldiers are one of the heaviest rendering loads in the Total War engine.
Anti-Aliasing (TAA)
TAA smooths edges but adds a constant rendering cost, especially at high resolutions with many units on screen.
Ambient Occlusion
Ambient occlusion adds subtle contact shading between units and terrain, but its cost grows quickly in battles with hundreds of overlapping soldiers.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Unit Detail
Determines the complexity of models and animations for each individual soldier, a factor that multiplies by the thousands in large battles.
Texture Quality
This game's textures aren't especially heavy compared to open-world titles.
Vegetation Quality
Vegetation in campaign maps and battles with oases or Nile-area zones adds extra geometry rarely noticed during active combat.
Battle Camera Distance Effects
This setting controls atmospheric and distance fog effects on the battlefield.
Water Quality
The Nile and coastal areas use water simulation with reflections that adds GPU cost on specific maps.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
NVIDIA DLSS 2
+30% FPSDLSS 2 works especially well in Total War: Pharaoh's massive battles, where the temporal noise generated by thousands of moving units benefits from the temporal reconstruction component.
AMD FSR 2
+22% FPSFSR 2 is the universal alternative for any GPU, including NVIDIA and Intel cards, and noticeably improves performance at high resolutions.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable DLSS in Balanced mode for battles with more than two full armies on screen.
- •Use updated Game Ready Driver profiles for Total War: Pharaoh.
- •On GPUs with 8GB of VRAM or less, keep Texture Quality on Medium.
AMD
- •Enable FSR 2 in Quality mode at 1440p/4K to offset the higher shadow and AO cost of the engine.
- •Update to the latest Adrenalin drivers.
- •If you use a Ryzen CPU with chiplets, enable Windows' performance mode.
Sistema
- •Prioritize clock speed and IPC over core count when choosing a processor.
- •Install the game on an SSD to reduce campaign loading times.
- •Close background applications that consume CPU before battles with more than 4,000 units on screen.
5. Known game issues
FPS drops in siege battles with many units
Siege battles with large cities and armies at the unit cap limit cause the game's most severe framerate drops.
Estado: Performance optimization patch (late 2023)
Stuttering at end of turn in advanced campaigns
In long campaigns with many active factions, AI processing at the end of each turn can generate noticeable micro-stutters.
Uneven CPU core usage
The Total War engine doesn't distribute load perfectly evenly across all available cores.
6. Frequently asked questions
Why do my FPS drop only in large battles and not on the campaign map?▾
Which setting should I lower first if I'm short on performance?▾
Is it worth enabling DLSS or FSR in a strategy game like this?▾
Can a powerful CPU make up for a modest GPU in this game?▾
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Calculate FPS for Total War: Pharaoh →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →