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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  • PopinFRESH007 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    You are simply ignoring the facts. When Bluray players launched they didn't play Blurays because there were none, because there was no standard. It took 3 years before there was a standard and 7 movies were released. Before then they were just high-end DVD players.

    These RTX cards also work out of the box. Its crazy I know, they actually can play current games and all with the highest settings and fastest frame rates. Similar to what happened with bluray, they will also support those new fangled DXR and DLSS options in games as they come out.
  • imaheadcase - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    First Blu-ray movies would be released on June 20, coinciding with the release of the first Blu-ray DVD player from Samsung, and a Sony VAIO Blu-ray PC.Jun 13, 2006
    The first batch distributed by Sony was on June 20th, 2006:

    The Fifth Element
    50 First Dates
    Hitch
    House of Flying Daggers
    The Terminator
    Underworld: Evolution
    xXx

    What was that again about facts?
  • V900 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    Working out of the box? You mean like the RTX 2080/ti/2070 cards?

    You’re willfully ignoring facts and pretend that it’s totally up in the air whether games will support RTX, and that they won’t be available for a long time...

    Which is entirely false.

    There are games that support RTX out right now. Like Tomb Raider

    More are coming this year: One of the biggest titles this year: Battlefield 5 supports it.

    And dozens of titles supporting RTX, many of them big AAA titles, are coming out in H1 2019.

    So no: Nobody is buying a card they “can’t even test.” If you buy an RTX card, it’ll work out of the box with RTX technology enabled.

    And it’s of course also the fastest card on the market for all the old titles that don’t support RTX.
  • sonny73n - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    @V900

    If you can’t compare performance per dollar of this gen and the previous, why even bother praising the new tech when currently none of the tech sites have any mean to test them?

    After reading your first comment, I couldn’t help but think that you’re a paid shill for Nvidia.
  • imaheadcase - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    You just ignored the facts and even proved yourself wrong in own statement. lol

    Let me sell you a car with the fastest engine, but i'm not going to let you use all the Horsepower..but i promise i'll enable it when i get the right parts for it. Don't worry about the $100k price tag on the car, its going to be awesome i swear..

    Do you get paid for every post by nvidia, or just a lump sum?
  • mscsniperx - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    You are comparing apples to oranges. There isn't even a raytracing game to compare to.. And when the truth comes out that even with RTX, there is a massive FPS hit.. well, it's game over.
  • DigitalFreak - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    First you complain that there aren't any raytracing games to get benchmarks from, then you state there will be a massive performance hit. If there are no games available to test with, you can't have any idea what their performance will be like.
  • tamalero - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    The slides/demos of Nvidia and the Beta of Battlefield brother..
    They show performance that could be potentially be "above" what users would expect.
  • imaheadcase - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    Hello Hairworks would like a word with you..
  • CoachAub - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    Laser discs were a big hit! ;)

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