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 is a neat split between the GTX 1060 6GB/RX 590 and the GTX 1660 Ti.

F1 2018 Compute & Synthetics
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  • Cellar Door - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link

    At the moment this card offers better perf/$ then a RX 580 - which is impressive considering Nvidia's price antics this generation.
  • eva02langley - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link

    No it is not.

    The RX 580 is 179$. Making it 2.304$ per frame on techspot. They screw up again with their cost analysis. Also, you have 2 AAA games with it bundle. The RX 580 is still the value king hand down.

    https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/1811/ben...

    Don't get me wrong, this card is interesting, but is it groundbreaking in anything? No... if Nvidia was offering it at 170$, then that would be disruptive.
  • Cellar Door - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link

    You are wrong, all the $179 580 cards are only 4GB. Please don't spread misinformation.
  • Marlin1975 - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link

    https://www.microcenter.com/product/479525/red-dra...

    It was $169 last week, now its $179.

    8Gb RX580s go for around $170-190 right now. The RX570 is as low as $140
  • eva02langley - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link

    The only thing you had to do is look at the price list on the first page to SEE that I am right and that YOU are spreading nonsense.
  • flyingpants265 - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link

    There is no such thing as $/frame.
  • ElDiomedes - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link

    Probably only in the US, I saw Microcentre offering some RX 580 8gb at $168. The 8 GB Nitro+ is still $340 here. While the 1660 will start from $230. In the SEA region, only a few retailers in Australia have the RX 580 in the ~$200 region. So keep in mind, no one is gonna buy AMD with those prices outside of US.
  • Qasar - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link

    eva02langley
    the AAA games they bundle with the cards are meaningless.. if you dont play them, or want them, so that is a moot point, and may not be a factor for some...

    how do they even come up with the cost per frame?? never even heard of that metric before.....
  • Threska - Tuesday, April 2, 2019 - link

    Not meaningless if one can sell all three games offsetting the purchase price.
  • PeachNCream - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link

    Not bad. The price point is reasonable and the performance is good enough. I wish it had a lower TDP and I don't care at all for the triple slot form factor. Still, this _might_ be the GPU that lures me back to owning a desktop PC for gaming. It is still difficult to justify the costs given that PCs end up as second acts with crappy console ports and you pay more for the hardware just to get poorly optimized games a few months after everybody else has already played them.

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