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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  • eva02langley - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link

    At 280$ for a Vega 56 with 3 games, it is brainless and one of the best value as of late. Can't wait for Navi to disrupt even more this overdue stagnant market.
  • CiccioB - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link

    Yes, it will be a new black hole in AMD quarters if the production cost/performance is the same as the old GCN line...
    You see, selling as HBM monster like Vega for that price simply means that the project is a compete flop (as it was Fiji) and nvidia can continue selling its mainstream GPU at the price they want despite the not so good market period.
  • eva02langley - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link

    Final Fantasy XV is another game gimping AMD due to gameworks implementation.
  • eddman - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link

    They disable those before benchmarking. From the article: "For our testing, we enable or adjust settings to the highest except for NVIDIA-specific features"
  • CiccioB - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link

    All games gimp nvidia s their engine is written for the consoles that mount obsolete AMD HW.
  • Oxford Guy - Saturday, February 23, 2019 - link

    It's hardly difficult to add in a bit of special slowdown sauce for the "PC" versions.
  • Comagnum - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link

    This is such a joke. Vega 56 is now the same price and out performs this terrible product, and the 1070 (AIB versions) performs similarly enough that the 1660ti has no real place in the market right now. Nvidia is a greedy terrible company. What a joke.
  • Falcon216 - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link

    I followed your advice and bought a Vega56 instead of a 1660Ti and now my power supply has been making those weird noises animals make wen they're suffering and need help what do I do?
  • Cooe - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link

    Fanboy nonsense alert!!! Unless you bought your power supply at a Chinese flea market, ignore this dude.

    (Granted there are totally cases where you'd want something like a 1660Ti over a V56 for efficiency reasons [say ultra SFF], but this guy's spitting nonsense)
  • Falcon216 - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link

    My point
    ========
    Your Head

    The V56 uses ~200w nominally depending on your choice of settings, in the detailed Tom's review it goes as low as 160w at the most minimum performance level and as high as 235w depending on the choice of power BIOS. The 1660Ti is then shown to use ~125w in BF1 and (assuming Tom's tested the V56 performance on stock settings) Anand's BF1 test shows a 9FPS lead (11%) over the 1660Ti. I'll trade that 11% performance for 40% less (absolute scale) power usage any day - My PSU ain't getting any younger and "lol just buy another one" is dumb advice dumb people make.

    Happy now?

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