Disclosure: The Linux developer provided us a free Steam game code for review purpose.
Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia was originally developed by Creative Assembly and was released for Windows last May 3, 2018. Feral Interactive released the Linux version on June 7, 2018, 2018 and it’s their 22nd game for Linux since June 2014. Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia is the 3rd game to be released on Linux without support for OpenGL and only uses Vulkan.
Features
- The Grand Campaign offers multiple routes to a glorious Victory; aggressively expand your territory through force of arms, acquire renown through construction, advanced technology and influence, or complete a series of unique objectives based on your chosen faction’s history. Once completed, steady yourself for a significant late-game challenge and the final, Ultimate victory condition.
- From the snowy highlands of Scotland to the orchards and meadows of Kent, unveil the extent of Anglo-Saxon Britain. Varied towns, cities and rural settings inspire a host of different battlefield environments. Experiment with the strategic opportunities afforded by newly capturable minor settlements. Throttle your enemies’ trade routes and coax them out of strong, defensible positions.
- Each faction will face a series of unique events and branching dilemmas, often based on authentic historical events and issues of the time. Embark on Viking expeditions, manage the Anglo-Saxon peasant economy, each faction feels and plays differently. Carve out unique roles for your King and Nobles, customise their impact by making meaningful choices about their development and determine how their story will unfold.
- Includes many updates to core Total War mechanics — such as provinces, politics, technologies, recruitment, dilemmas and much more — designed to make your experience more immersive and more meaningful.
Test Results
A high-end gaming PC is not required to enjoy Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia but it still requires a decent gaming PC if you will play at 1920 x 1080 resolution or at 2560 x 1080 resolution. Shown below is the built-in benchmark running on Radeon RX 580 8GB paired with Core i7 7700 3.6 GHz (No Turbo). Take note that video recording using OBS has a performance penalty and the frame rates you see in the frame rate counter will be about 25% higher when there is no video recording.
The built-in benchmark also logs the frame time data and the log files are located at “.local/share/feral-interactive/Thrones of Britannia/VFS/User/AppData/Roaming/The Creative Assembly/ThronesofBritannia/benchmarks“. To those who want to do their own tests or replicate our results, watch our tutorial on how to derive the frame rate based from the frame time data.
The game features 5 image quality presets – Low, Medium, High, Ultra, and Extreme. There are also individual graphics settings which you can tweak if you want to maximize performance. I didn’t test Medium preset because the game already looks kind of bland when using High preset. Ultra preset looks better but the performance hit is very large. The sweet spot between performance and image quality is tweaking the High preset by manually enabling 16x Anisotropic Filtering and SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion).
Radeon RX 580 8GB performs well in this game at 2560 x 1080 resolution using High preset. A Radeon RX Vega 64 8GB or a GeForce GTX 1080 8GB is probably needed if you want to push the frame rate to 100 FPS or higher when using the tweaked High preset.
The game officially supports only Ubuntu 18.04 LTS but I did not encounter any game crash or serious problem on my gaming PC running on Ubuntu MATE 17.10. I’m also happy to report that Radeon RX 580 8GB runs this game without any graphical glitches on the Mesa 18.0.1 driver. This is another milestone for Linux gaming.
For the CPU, Feral Interactive seems to be just right with Core i7 3770K as a recommended CPU. The CPU usage on my Core i7 7700 is about 20 – 40% only and disabling Hyper Threading does not have any significant performance penalty.
Related readings:
Rise of the Tomb Raider – Vulkan Performance Review
F1 2017 – Vulkan Performance Review
Closing Thoughts
Overall, I’m satisfied with the performance of Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia. The game runs very well on mainstream hardware and Feral Interactive seems to be getting really good with using Vulkan for developing Linux games. About a year has passed since they first used Vulkan on Mad Max and it seems that all upcoming games from Feral Interactive would only use Vulkan. This is another proof that Linux is a viable gaming platform. I hope that Feral Interactive would someday enable Vulkan support for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and HITMAN.
You can buy Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia at Steam for ₱1,269.95 or, if you want to give more support to Feral Interactive and Linux gaming, at The Feral Store for $39.99. Steam Play is supported which means you only buy it once and you can play it on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Remember to read this guide if you will play the game on Linux and on Windows to make performance comparisons and you want to make your purchase count as a Linux game sale.
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