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 - 2560x1440 - Ultra Quality

Total War: Warhammer II - 1920x1080- Ultra Quality

Rounding out our look at game performance is Total War: Warhammer II.

Here, the GTX 1660 Ti lags behind the RTX 2060 and GTX 1070 FE more than in the other games, offering only somewhere around 80% of the RTX 2060 speed and 90% of the GTX 1070. In turn, it doesn't improve as much upon the GTX 1060 6GB and GTX 960, though practically speaking it has rendered its RX 590 competition as last-generation performance, given that it's neck-and-neck with the GTX 1060 6GB FE.

F1 2018 Compute & Synthetics
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  • peevee - Monday, February 25, 2019 - link

    What are you talking about? 3-5% Look at 960 vs 1060, right there in this article. About 100%!
  • Smell This - Monday, February 25, 2019 - link

    Uhhh, Peewee?
    Get back to me when you compare the GTX 960 2GB specs to the 6GB GTX 1660 Ti specs (and the GTX 1060 3/6GB specs, as well).

    I know it's hard for you. It's tough to hit all those moving targets (and goal posts) ...
  • eva02langley - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link

    Not impressive at all when the Vega 56 sold for the same price with 3 AAA games and offering 15%+ performances.
  • cfenton - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link

    "Instead, AMD’s competitor for the GTX 1660 Ti looks like it will be the Radeon RX Vega 56. The company sent word last night that they are continuing to work with partners to offer lower promotional prices on the card, including a single model that was available for $279, but as of press time has since sold out. Notably, AMD is asserting that this is not a price drop, so there’s an unusual bit of fence sitting here; the company may be waiting to see what actual, retail GTX 1660 Ti card prices end up like. So I’m not wholly convinced we’re going to see too many $279 Vega 56 cards, but we’ll see."

    If Vega 56 becomes available for $279 regularly, then it will be a better deal. Right now, that price is only being offered on one model that you can't buy. The cheapest Vega 56 model on Newegg is $399 right now.
  • eva02langley - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link

    You can get it for the same price, move on, it is the better deal. Also, expect higher price than MSRP from OEM creating special models with different coolers.

    And basically... RX 3080 is supposed to be between 250-300$ with Vega 64 + 15% performances. The interest of this card is going to be short lived.
  • MadManMark - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link

    Yes, we know -- AMD's next card is always going to be the one to buy.

    But isn't it odd that by the time it stops being the "next" card and becomes the current card, suddenly it isn't that appealing anymore, folks like you immediately move onto the next "nest" card? Vega was the "next" card a year ago ...
  • cfenton - Saturday, February 23, 2019 - link

    Where? I can't find one at that price anywhere, while there are several 1660TIs in stock at $279.
  • Retycint - Tuesday, February 26, 2019 - link

    Not anymore, no. As far as I've checked, all the $279 Vega 56s have sold out at the moment, and with AMD stating that it's a temporary price cut, I'm not expecting anymore $279 Vegas to come our way.
  • Cellar Door - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link

    You should try reading the actual article sometimes - once again 'jjj' with a pointless comment of the day.
  • Ushio01 - Saturday, February 23, 2019 - link

    It costs what a GTX1060 did at launch and offers GTX1070 performance which still costs more.

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