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.

The standard Ultra, High, and Medium presets were used with the more graphically-bound battle benchmark.

Total War: Warhammer II - 1920x1080- Ultra Quality

Total War: Warhammer II - 1920x1080 - High Quality

Total War: Warhammer II - 1920x1080 - Medium Quality

Rounding out our look at game performance is Total War: Warhammer II. While the GTX 1650 is closer to the GTX 1050 Ti than the GTX 1060 3GB, the subdued performance of the RX 570 brings them near-level.

F1 2018 Compute & Synthetics
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  • PeachNCream - Tuesday, May 7, 2019 - link

    Agreed with nevc on this one. When you start discussing higher end and higher cost components, consideration for power consumption comes off the proverbial table to a great extent because priority is naturally assigned moreso to performance than purchase price or electrical consumption and TCO.
  • eek2121 - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    Disclaimer, not done reading the article yet, but I saw your comment.

    Some people look for low wattage cards that don't require a power connector. These types of cards are particularly suited for MiniITX systems that may sit under the TV. The 750ti was super popular because of this. Having Turings HEVC video encode/decode is really handy. You can put together a nice small MiniITX with something like the Node 202 and it will handle media duties much better than other solutions.
  • CptnPenguin - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    That would be great if it actually had the Turing HVEC encoder - it does not; it retains the Volta encoder for cost saving or some other Nvidia-Alone-Knows reason. (source: Hardware Unboxed and Gamer's Nexus).

    Anyone buying a 1650 and expecting to get the Turing video encoding hardware is in for a nasty surprise.
  • Oxford Guy - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link

    "That would be great if it actually had the Turing HVEC encoder - it does not; it retains the Volta encoder"

    Yeah, lack of B support stinks.
  • JoeyJoJo123 - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    Or if you're going with a miniITX low wattage system, you can cut out the 75w GPU and just go with a 65w AMD Ryzen 2400G since the integrated Vega GPU is perfectly suitable for an HTPC type system. It'll save you way more money with that logic.
  • 0ldman79 - Sunday, May 19, 2019 - link

    What they are going to do though is look at the fast GPU + PSU vs the slower GPU alone.

    People with OEM boxes are going to buy one part at a time. Trust me on this, it's frustrating, but it's consistent.
  • Gich - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    25$ a year? So 7cents a day?
    7cents is more then 1kWh where I live.
  • Yojimbo - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    The us average is a bit over 13 cents per kilowatt hour. But I made an error in the calculation and was way off. It's more like $15 over 2 years and not $50. Sorry.
  • DanNeely - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    That's for an average of 2h/day gaming. Bump it up to a hard core 6h/day and you get around $50/2 years. Or 2h/day but somewhere with obnoxiously expensive electricity like Hawaii or Germany.
  • rhysiam - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link

    I'd just like to point out that if you've gamed for an average of 6h per day over 2 years with a 570 instead of a 1650, then you've also been enjoying 10% or so extra performance. That's more than 4000 hours of higher detail settings and/or frame rates. If people are trying to calculate the true "value" of a card, then I would argue that this extra performance over time, let's not forget the performance benefits!

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