Total War: Warhammer PC Performance Review

Total War: Warhammer PC Performance Review

Conclusion

The recent history of Total War does not paint a good picture, with Rome II and Attila Total War being notoriously difficult to run at steady framerates and both being filled with a large number of bugs and issues at launch. With Total War Warhammer, I can happily announce that Creative Assembly has not been following this trend and has this time provided a game that has been entirely bug-free during my 8 hours of playtime outside of my hours of GPU performance testing. 

Creative Assembly needs to be congratulated on what they have achieved here, creating a game that will surely be remembered as the best performing Total War game to date but that does not mean that Total War Warhammer does not have things that they can improve upon in the future. 

When to comes to graphical options the game offers a lot of variety, allowing this game to be scaled from lower end systems all the way to a top of the line PCs, allowing this game to be played by anyone that is willing to call themselves a PC gamer. The graphical options menu has a lot that can be adjusted, giving the player a lot of freedom when it comes to what they want to change, though it would be nice if players could independently adjust graphical settings for the Campaign map and real-time battles if they wish. 

One major issue that we found with the game is that while the CPU performance bottlenecking that is present is previous Total War games has been lessened, it is still able to impact performance heavily in some situations. The games upcoming DirectX 12 update should lessen the amount of CPU performance issues in the game, but it is nonetheless something that Creative Assembly still needs to look into. 

While this game is an AMD Gaming Evolved title Total War Warhammer does perform better on Nvidia GPUs at this time with its DirectX 11 version, though that is something that looks like it will be changing with the games upcoming DirectX 12 update. AMD has worked with Creative Assembly on their DirectX 12 implementation and the CPU and GPU performance benefits in this game should make the DirectX 12 version the “definitive version” when the update is released in a few weeks, though mostly due to the CPU performance benefit that the new API can yield.   

All in all Total War Warhammer is the most stable and best performing Total War game that Creative Assembly has ever created, though it is something that Creative Assembly does still have room to improve on, at least on the CPU side. 

If you have been itching for a good strategy game where there is a large amount of varying playstyles, factions, and amazing graphics, Total War Warhammer is certainly a game that you should be looking at. Whether you want to settle grudges as the Dwarfs, unify humanity with the Empire or spread Chaos, corruption or War as the Chaos warriors, Vampires and Orcs respectively, Total War Warhammer will certainly have you covered.   

 

You can join the discussion on Total War Warhammer on the OC3D Forums. 

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