Classic Total War games receive a free performance boost alongside Intel 12th Gen fixes

Empire and Napoleon Total War have both been updated to better utilise modern CPUs

Last month, it was discovered that both Total War Empire and Total War Napoleon players were running into issues when playing both games on Intel’s 12th Generation processors, likely due to the hybrid nature of these CPUs. Back then Creative Assembly promised to address these issues with patches, and now these updates have arrived. 

When Intel launched their first mass market hybrid CPUs with their 12th generation Alder Lake platform, Intel delivered to the PC market CPUs with multiple different types of CPU core. With Alder Lake, Intel offered users performance-focused P-Cores and efficiency-focused E-Cores, both of which have differing characteristics. This had the potential to confuse software, resulting in performance issues for some programs and bugs for others. 

At launch, there were many games that performed poorly or simply did not run at all when used with Intel’s 12th Generation Alder Lake processors. Thankfully, game developers were able to quickly patch their games to eliminate these issues, knowing that future Intel CPUs will utilise hybrid x86 designs. Now, Total War Empire and Total War Napoleon are the newest games to receive Intel 12th Gen related fixes. 

Free Performance for users of modern CPUs

With their new updates to Empire Total War and Napoleon Total War, both games are now said to make better use of CPUs with modern core architectures. These changes should enable notable performance increases for both games, which is great news for players who want to return to these classic Total War titles.

Below is what Creative Assembly had to say about their new Total War Empire and Total War Napoleon updates. 

     Greetings commanders,

We’ve pushed out a small update to Total War: NAPOLEON and Total War: Empire which addresses crashes with 12th gen Intel CPUs. This update also removes integrated chat from the game. Read on for full details:

Due to difficulties supporting and moderating dated chat systems in the current online environment, we’ve taken steps to remove the integrated chat from Total War: Napoleon, Total War Empire, and other legacy titles in our catalogue. We are, however, continuing to investigate ways to properly implement and support chat in our future projects and will keep you updated on any changes or developments we make.
 
In the meantime, we encourage you to make use of the official Total War Discord server as a free chat and voice option, or to use one of the many third-party programs available to communicate with your teammates.
 
In addition to this change, we’ve updated the game to better use of modern architecture, which should result in notable performance improvements in Total War: Napoleon and Total War: Empire. We’ve also added support and fixed a crash seen with 12th-generation Intel CPUs.

In addition to the CPU-related changes to both games, Creative Assembly has decided to remove the integrated chat features from both Empire and Napoleon Total War, citing difficulties supporting and moderating the system. Players of both of these Total War games should utilise the Total War Discord server to chat with their friends while playing the game, or use a 3rd party chat service.

While it is somewhat disappointing to see a feature disappear from these classic Total War titles, I doubt anyone was actually using the option before this update. As an enjoyer of classic Total War titles, I am happy to see that Creative Assembly has updated their older Total War titles to support modern CPUs, and that they didn’t stop at simply fixing Total Wars Intel 12th Gen bugs but also delivered performance increases for both of these classic Total War titles. To the developers that worked to update these 12+ year old games for modern hardware, thank you. 

You can join the discussion on Total War: Empire and Napoleon getting performance improvements and Intel 12th gen fixes on the OC3D Forums.