Total War: Warhammer PC Performance Review

DirectX 12 – Is the future brighter?

 

Right now the game that makes the best use of DirectX 12, in my opinion, is Ashes of the Singularity, using the strengths of the new API to produce an RTS that has a massive unit count and can have a mind-bending amount of action happening on the screen at once. 

In Ashes of the Singularity systems with AMD’s DirectX 12 ready GPUs were not only able to see gains because of Asynchronous Compute and better GPU usage but also through CPU performance benefits, giving AMD a nice performance bump with the new API. 

Total War Warhammer presents a very similar scenario, where there can be thousands of units on screen at once all battling it out and acting independently. The game can a lot of the time be limited by CPU performance, with one CPU thread taking a lot of the strain, making the game a perfect match for DirectX 12. 

While Total War Warhammer is a massive improvement over its predecessors, the game still has room for improvement on the performance front, which is something that the upcoming DirectX 12 patch will hopefully address.