Total War: Warhammer PC Performance Review

4K Testing with AMD R9 Fury X and Nvidia GTX 980Ti

 

At 4K we see AMD’s R9 Fury X become much more competitive with the GTX 980Ti, offering very similar performance at most settings, with Nvidia still taking the lead when running in DirectX 11. 

Strangely enough even at 4K we were able to see GPU utilisation drop under some circumstances, suggesting that the game is still being limited by at times by its CPU usage. 

Over the past two days I have been playing my own campaign of the game and I have found the game very playable at 4K High settings on both GPUs and while both have their noticeable performance dips, especially in a demanding underground battle, they both are quite playable if you are tolerant to some FPS dips in this demanding RTS.   

Personally, I hope that this performance improves when DirectX 12 support is added to the game, as a steadier framerate will be nicer and alleviating the existing CPU bottleneck is something that I would love to see. 

 

 

DirectX 12

Below is the results that we have received when using an early build of the game’s DirectX 12 benchmark, which as I have said on the previous page is based on a much less demanding map. This means that our DirectX 11 results are not directly comparable, so do not expect 10 or 20 FPS gains from the upcoming API update at 4K.

While the benchmark here is not a representation of the most demanding battles and maps that this game has to offer, it does offer a fairly good representation of what I have seen in a lot of the less demanding battle maps and on the campaign map. 

Hopefully the DirectX 12 update will be able to allow the game to better utilise system resources and allow the game to render more smoothly, as right now Total War Warhammer could use the performance bump in certain maps and parts of the game.