Total War Warhammer 3: How To Fix Lag & FPS Drops

The PC game Total War: Warhammer 3 is a strategy game that combines the gameplay of the Total War series with the setting of the Warhammer Fantasy Battles tabletop game. The first title was released on Steam back in 2016. Warhammer 3 is obviously the third instalment of the title with a whole lot of changes.

The game had a brief positive rating before it got review bombed on Steam by Chinese Players. The game has 5k, mixed ratings now. For those who don’t know, Total War is a very famous game in China.

Total Warhammer is a AAA title that is published by Sega and developed by Creative Assembly. If you’ve played the other TW titles you must be aware of the horrendous optimization that the games are released with. This title is no exception and has a few problems which can be fixed easily through a few tweaks.

The cataclysmic conclusion to the Total War: WARHAMMER trilogy is coming. Rally your forces and step into the Realm of Chaos, a dimension of mind-bending horror where the very fate of the world will be decided. Will you conquer your Daemons… or command them?

– Steam Page

How To Fix Warhammer 3 FPS Drops and Lag

Before moving to the tweaks, let’s look at the system requirements of the game:

System Requirements

This game should run well on most computers. The mentioned graphics card requirements are very low, even for the recommended hardware. According to Steam Data, Nvidia’s 10 series cards are still used a lot. This is sad and true at the same time because of the hoarding and scalping of 30 series cards.

Best Settings for Total Warhammer 3

While these settings should work for most computers, you’ll still have to make a few changes according to your system’s configuration.

Main Display Settings

Advanced Graphic Settings

There are a few more checkboxes that you’ll find other than the settings mentioned above. Uncheck everything other than Proximity fading and Sharpening. Resolution scale and UI scale are personal preferences.

You can test settings using the in-game benchmarking tool.

Whenever you face any trouble running any new title, the first thing you should do is tone down the in-game settings.

Use Developer’s Fix

CA_Evagelos at the TotalWar forum has published a bunch of fixes and tweaks for issues reported by users.

Note: This fix is specifically mentioned for PCs running Windows 10 with Intel 12th Generator Alderlake CPUs.

• Locate the scripts folder of Total Warhammer 3 using the location mentioned below:
  – Steam: %appdata%\The Creative Assembly\Warhammer3\scripts
  – Gamepass: %appdata%\The Creative Assembly\Warhammer3\GDK\scripts
  – Epic Store: %appdata%\The Creative Assembly\Warhammer3\EOS\scripts
• Create a new text-document in the directory. Right click select New > Text Document
• Open the document file and paste the following code

HYBRID_CPUS_TREAT_ALL_CORES_UNIFORMLY true;
number_of_threads 5;

• Save the file as “user.script” (or user.script.txt, it doesn’t have to be any extension)
• Once you have saved the file, run the game.

Let’s move to the next set of fixes.

Update Your Device Drivers

• Download Nvidia Drivers
• Download AMD Drivers

Do you wonder why you should update your graphic card drivers? It would be good to check on the new updates for two key reasons. Firstly, it’s the only way to ensure you have the latest drivers for your device. The newer drivers will allow your computer to run every graphics-intensive application and keep up with any changes in technology without trailing too far behind.

Nvidia has already pushed the update optimized for the game, and it can be downloaded right away using Geforce Experience.

Change Graphic Control Panel Panel Settings

Here are a few tweaks for both Nvidia and AMD Users that will provide instantly boost your FPS in Total War: Warhammer 3:

For Nvidia Users:

• Open up Nvidia’s Control Panel. Right-click on desktop > click Nvidia control panel
• Click Manage 3D Settings > Program Settings
• Find “Total War”, you can manually add the game if it’s not in the list
• Now, make the following changes:

Monitor Tech: G-Sync (If available)
Maximum Pre-rendered frames: 2
Threaded optimization: On
Power Management: Prefer Maximum Performance
Texture Filtering – Quality:  Performance

For AMD Users

• Anti-Aliasing Mode: Use Application settings
• Anti-aliasing Method: Multisampling
• Morphological Filtering: Off
• Anisotropic Filtering Mode: Use application settings
• Texture Filtering Quality: Performance
• Surface Format Optimization: On
• Wait for V-sync: Off
• OpenGL Triple Buffering: Off
• Shader Cache: AMD optimized
• Tesselation Mode: Override application settings
• Maximum Tesselation Level: Off
• GPU Workload: Graphics
• Chill: Off
• Frame Rate Target Control: Disabled

Enable Game Mode in Windows

The new game mode makes gaming on your computer even better. When you’re playing a game in game mode, Windows prioritizes the game’s performance and gives it more of the computer’s resources. This means that the game will run faster and smoother, with less lag and fewer interruptions. The game mode also ensures that your computer’s performance won’t be impacted when you’re not playing a game.

To enable game mode, go to Settings > Gaming > Game Mode.

Disable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling

This option was added to the graphic settings page after the Windows 10 May 2020 update. Many YouTubers such as Linus Tech Tips, Jayz2Cents, Gamers Nexus have done various tests to compare the performance when turned on or off. They found that setting makes little to no difference, good or bad on mid to high-end machines and slight improvement to framerates on low-end machines (but also brings instability at times).

Conclusion: Disable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling.

These settings and optimizations were tested on PCs with the following configuration:

• i5 8500 with GTX 1060 @1080p
• i3 10300 with RTX 2060 @1080p
• i7 8700 with GTX 1650 @1080p
• AMD Ryzen 5600x with RTX 3080 @2k

Make sure to comment below if this guide helped you out; we tried this on four gaming systems and saw an instant improvement.