Total War WARHAMMER DX12: PC graphics performance benchmark review

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System requirements

Visual Image Quality

Albeit based on the same game rendering engine that was used in the previous edition Warhammer looks good at our selected Ultra quality settings, but nothing more then that. The developpers in the game engine:

Our graphics team has spent considerable time on engine optimisations and there’s lots of good news in this regard, so let’s talk about specific engine optimisations which benefit everyone.

Total War has traditionally been quite CPU-bound, with the game-draw and graphics render processes both running on the same CPU thread. Over time, as the engine has evolved and become more demanding, this has become an increasingly important bottleneck for us. During the course of TWWH’s development, we’ve spent time separating these so they now run independently on their own threads. We’ve also optimized our task-system to have better multi-threading performance across the board. In GPU terms, we’ve shifted our particle simulation pipeline from the pixel shader to the compute shader, which is a more efficient use of the GPU’s time. In fact we’ve done this with several parts of the rendering pipeline, further utilizing the GPU and letting the CPU focus on everything else it has to do.

Long story short: all of this means we’re using the CPU and the GPU more efficiently. TW: Warhammer takes better advantage of multicore CPUs, balancing the load across the cores so that no single core is maxed out and limiting framerates while others sit idle. We’ve also switched up the Total War engine from 32 to 64-bit. While this brings no tangible performance benefits, we no longer have the 32-bit restriction of a maximum of 2GB of memory devoted to processes. The upshot is we can basically cram a greater variety of models, animations and textures into battles. One neat side benefit though is that it’s brought a reduction in end-turn times. Coupled with further optimisation we’ve done on the AI’s decision-making, this means you’ll enjoy quite noticeably reduced end-turn rounds while all the AI factions take their turns.

PC Minimum Specifications:

  • Operating System: Windows 7 64Bit
  • Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0Ghz
  • RAM: 3GB*
  • Hard Drive: 35 GB
  • Video Card: AMD Radeon HD 5770 1024MB | NVIDIA GTS 450 1024MB | Intel HD4000 @720P

(*)PC integrated graphics chipsets require 4GB ram, e.g. Intel HD series

PC Recommended Specifications:

  • Operating System: Windows 7/8.1/10 64Bit
  • Processor: Intel Core i5-4570 3.20GHz
  • RAM: 8 GB
  • Hard Drive: 35 GB
  • Video Card: AMD Radeon R9 270X 2048MB | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 2048MB @1080P

PC 60fps+ Specifications:

  • Operating System: Windows 7/8.1/10 64Bit
  • Processor: Intel Core i7-4790K 4.0 GHz
  • RAM: 8 GB
  • Hard Drive: 35 GB
  • Video Card: AMD Fury X or Nvidia GTX 980 @1080P

Total War: WARHAMMER is now DX12 compatible, and the graphics dev team has been working in close concert with AMD’s engineers on the implementation. This title is an AMD Evolved title and thus ws optimized with AMD.
  

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