Total War: Warhammer PC Performance Review

Total War: Warhammer PC Performance Review

 

The Total War series is one that has often suffered from a lot of performance issues, especially when a new game launches. From Empire all the way to Attila Total War the series has been as famous for its performance issues as it has been for its unique gameplay and massive scale battles. 

Creative Assembly, the developers of the franchise, says that now is the time for change and have reworked the game engine to make much better use of PC hardware and to create what is the most stable Total War game that I have ever played.  

In Total War Warhammer, the series takes bold steps into many new directions, into the realm of fantasy with new races and magic, to the skies with flying units and mounts and into the modern day with 64-bit system compatibility and a soon to be released DirectX 12 version. 

While this is the most impressive Total war to date, the game is not without a few issues. Is Total War: Warhammer worth buying at launch I hear a lot of you ask? let’s find out. 

 

 

Drivers 

For this game, we will be using the newest drivers that were available when the game released, which is Nvidia’s Game Ready Geforce 368.22 driver and AMD’s 16.5.3 driver, both of which are the most recent GPU drivers for either company. 

 

Test Setup  

We will be testing this game on our dedicated GPU test rig using the current flagship GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia. Both GPUs will be the reference design and will be running at stock settings. 

 

AMD R9 Fury X & Nvidia GTX 980Ti
Intel Core i7 6700K @ 4.7GHz
ASUS Maximus VIII Hero
G.Skill Ripjaws 4x4GB DDR4 3200MHz
Corsair HX1200i
Corsair H110i GT
Windows 10 x64 

         

Nvidia GTX 980Ti (Left), AMD R9 Fury X (Right)

 

To represent AMD and Nvidia’s Mid-range GPU offerings we have decided to use the AMD R9 380 and the Nvidia GTX 960. Both of these GPUs will be the ASUS Strix models

Both of these GPUs offer very similar performance in most scenarios and come in at very similar price points, so it will be very interesting to see which GPU will come out on top. 

 

            

Nvidia GTX 960(Left), AMD R9 380(Right)