Total War: Warhammer II (DX11)

Last in our 2018 game suite is Total War: Warhammer II, built on the same engine of Total War: Warhammer. While there is a more recent Total War title, Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia, that game was built on the 32-bit version of the engine. The first TW: Warhammer was a DX11 game was to some extent developed with DX12 in mind, with preview builds showcasing DX12 performance. In Warhammer II, the matter, however, appears to have been dropped, with DX12 mode still marked as beta, but also featuring performance regression for both vendors.

It's unfortunate because Creative Assembly themselves have acknowledged the CPU-bound nature of their games, and with re-use of game engines as spin-offs, DX12 optimization would have continued to provide benefits, especially if the future of graphics in RTS-type games will lean towards low-level APIs.

There are now three benchmarks with varying graphics and processor loads; we've opted for the Battle benchmark, which appears to be the most graphics-bound.

Total War
Warhammer II
1920x1080 2560x1440 3840x2160
Average FPS

At 1080p, the cards quickly run into the CPU bottleneck, which is to be expected with top-tier video cards and the CPU intensive nature of RTS'es. The Founders Edition power and clock tweaks prove less useful here at 4K, but the models are otherwise in keeping with the expected 1-2-3 linup of 2080 Ti, 2080, and 1080 Ti, with the latter two roughly on par and the 2080 Ti pushing further.

F1 2018 Compute & Synthetics
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  • tamalero - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    Unlike a video card, DVD were a STANDARD. set to replace the DVD. This wasn't a war between BETAMAX and VHS again. It was an evolution.
    And as you said it, they had a few titles coming on.
    Nvidia currently is offering ZERO options for what they charge insanely.

    Even those 4k TVs you mentioned.. had demos and downlodable content.
    It was the future.

    Nvidia's game in some of these RTX features are solely of Nvidia, not a global standard.
  • tamalero - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    Errata: set to replace the "CDS" not DVDs.. They do really need an edit button here.
  • Writer's Block - Monday, October 1, 2018 - link

    Not a great comparrison.
    Mainly because: games making use of RTX and othe new features is: Zero.
    OlED and 4k/DVD/Blue: pretty much zero/extremely small/dozen or so - not of the aforementioned is as low as zero, so the consumer could see what they were getting.
  • boozed - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    Early adopters have always paid over the odds for an immature experience. That's the decision they make. You pays your money and you takes your chances...
  • Gastec - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link

    Yes, drug addicts would also agree
  • ianmills - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    RTX - Radeon technology cross off the list. Nvidia is free to price as they please XD
  • NikosD - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    1080 Ti vs 980 Ti ~ 70% for 50$ more MSRP

    1080 vs 980 ~ 60% for 50$ more MSRP

    2080 Ti vs 1080 Ti ~ 30% for 300$ more MSRP (actual price difference is a lot more)

    Please, let's boycott Turing cards.

    nVidia must learn its lesson.

    Skip it.
  • V900 - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    If you look at AMDs Vega and compare it with the previous AMD flagship: Fury, you see a similar 30-40% increase in performance.

    In other words: This isn’t Nvidia wanting to rip gamers off, it’s just a consequence of GPU makers pushing up against the end of Moore’s law.
  • formulaLS - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    It IS nVidia wanting to rip off gamers. Their prices are absolutely a huge rip off for what you get.
  • DigitalFreak - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    Blame AMD for not competing. Nvidia would never be able to do this if AMD had a competitive offering.

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