Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War III PC performance review

Conclusion

In real-time strategy games, a high framerate is key, offering users faster response times and more frequent display updates to give accurate locations for your opponents and their movements. Battles can be lost due to split second decision making, so it is always worth playing at 60FPS to help quicken your response times and avoid tactical blunders.  

With Dawn of War III’s campaign relying so heavily on “Hero Units” and the multiplayer mode’s dependence on using units abilities for optimal play, high levels of game performance are essential. In an RTS game, the speed and accuracy at which you can use special unit these abilities can make a literal difference between victory and defeat.  

Thankfully Dawn of War III is an easy game to run, but it is also a difficult game to max out, with exceptionally demanding AA options and plenty of ways to utilise your PC’s graphical horsepower on enhanced visuals. While this game only has 5 major graphical options, the game does scale very well to both low-end and premium systems, with our system with an RX 480 offering average framerate of 159.8FPS and 46.7 FPS at Minimum and Maximum settings respectively. This is a lot more scalability than most modern games currently offer. 

When it comes to graphical performance, it is clear that AMD’s hardware offers a huge advantage over their Nvidia counterparts, with the R9 Fury X offering framerates that are competitive with the GTX 1080, which is surprising for such an old GPU, especially since it was designed to compete with the GTX 980 Ti. With AMD’s lack of a high-end/premium GPU lineup today Nvidia still remains on top of our graphs with their GTX 1080 and their higher-end GTX 1080 Ti, though this could change with the release of Vega. 

In Dawn of War III, the first piece of advice that should be given to PC users is that they should avoid using this game’s medium or high AA settings unless they are already playing the game with framerates that are well in excess of 60FPS. Lowering your AA setting is by far the easiest way to gain some extra performance from this game, with these setting having more of an impact than any other setting within the game, aside from changes in resolution. 

With the correct settings, most PC gamers should be able to run this game with framerates of over 60FPS, which is exactly what players should be aiming for here given the fast-paced nature of RTS combat.

Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War III offers very little to complain about on PC, offering very scalable performance despite the small number of graphical settings available and offers great framerates on modern hardware with some minor tweaking.

Some will complain about this game playing better on AMD hardware, though it must be remembered that games will always have an advantage on one side or the other. This gap between the GTX 1060 and RX 480 is not exactly big enough to warrant a major complaint, especially given AMD’s lack of a high-end/premium GPU lineup at the time of writing. 

Dawn of War III marks a great return to the RTS genre for Relic, coming with none of the obvious performance issues that often plague real-time strategy titles. This is an impressive launch for an RTS on a hardware/playability level, as one only needs to mention Starcraft 2 to know how much of a performance hog this genre can be, especially on CPUs.

 

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