Total War: Warhammer PC Performance Review

1080p Testing with the GTX 960 and  R9 380

 

In the past Total War games have been notoriously difficult to run with consistently high framerates and thankfully this has changed with Warhammer, with the game being fairly easy to play with over 40FPS averages in real-time battles.  

Being an RTS game Total War Warhammer does not require a constant 60FPS to play, though watching the real-time battles at a smooth framerate is certainly something that you will want to experience.  

In the current DirectX 11 version of the game, we can see that AMD’s R9 380 does perform a little worse than Nvidia’s GTX 960 but both remain very competitive and can easily play the game at high settings with reasonable framerates.  Players will need higher end hardware in order to enjoy Ultra settings or a solid 60FPS framerate on anything but low, but given the sheer scale and graphical detail in the game this is pretty much expected. 

  

 

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 20 or 30 FPS gains from the upcoming API update. 

Here the GTX 960 and the R9 380 perform see a reversal when it comes to performance, with AMD gaining the performance lead in the game, likely due to AMD’s work with Creative Assembly on their DirectX 12 implementation and use of Asynchronous Compute.