Total War: Rome 2

The second strategy game in our benchmark suite, Total War: Rome 2 is the latest game in the Total War franchise. Total War games have traditionally been a mix of CPU and GPU bottlenecks, so it takes a good system on both ends of the equation to do well here. In this case the game comes with a built-in benchmark that plays out over a forested area with a large number of units, definitely stressing the GPU in particular.
For this game in particular we’ve also gone and turned down the shadows to medium. Rome’s shadows are extremely CPU intensive (as opposed to GPU intensive), so this keeps us from CPU bottlenecking nearly as easily.

Total War: Rome 2 is another AFR-unfriendly game, and consequently a game where the fastest single-GPU setup is going to be the fastest setup overall. To that end the GTX 780 Ti once again wins at 2560, beating the 290X by 17% and coming up a fraction of a frame short of averaging 50fps. In this case Rome has something of an appetite for memory bandwidth, playing well into the GTX 780 Ti’s design due to the upgrade to 7GHz GDDR5. Consequently the GTX 780 also takes a larger than normal lead over the GTX Titan and GTX 780, beating the two cards by 11% and 24% respectively.

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  • 1Angelreloaded - Saturday, November 16, 2013 - link

    False I Hit the 3.5 Gb limit quite a few times due to it being a 32 bit game, now if they are 64bit games then yes they will use more than 3GB for textures and draw distance , but meh you know what your talking about.......right.
  • ahlan - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link

    Damage control Nvidia fanboy! Nvidia fanboys are delusional as MS and Apple fanboys...

    Keep paying more for the same performance...
  • dylan522p - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    Not at all. In quiet more. It runs hotter, is louder 95% of the time and is using more power.
  • dylan522p - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    And performs significantly worse.
  • DMCalloway - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    Definition of upsetting: Early gtx 780 adopters now able to purchase a 'true' gtx 780 at the same price point previous gtx 780's were at launch. Nvidia sat back, took everyone's cash, and now to remain competitive finally release a fully enabled chip..... wow
  • Spunjji - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    I think early adopters on both sides got dicked here. The R9 290 makes everything else look like a joke in terms of pricing, for all its manifest flaws.
  • dylan522p - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    I would rather not have the 480v2, in my machine.
  • Yojimbo - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    And next year they'll release something even faster at the same price point. You can't have both increasing performance/price over time and also not have your new hardware become a comparatively bad deal in the future. People who bought the GTX 780 when it came out got 5 to 6 months of use of the card in exchange for a card which is now ~15% slower than what's available at the same price point.
  • ShieTar - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link

    In other words: Nvidia did what absolutely every other CPU & GPU provider has also done over the last 30 years? Wow indeed.

    Everybody wants to bring the most profitable product possible to the market. That means, you need to be good enough to interest customers and cheap enough to be affordable. And you don't get better or cheaper, unless something changes the market, e.g. competition.
  • extide - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    You stated the 290x is "unable to compete with an older architecture." That is false. LOL

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