Total War: Shogun 2

Our next benchmark is Shogun 2, which is a continuing favorite to our benchmark suite. Total War: Shogun 2 is the latest installment of the long-running Total War series of turn based strategy games, and alongside Civilization V is notable for just how many units it can put on a screen at once. Even 2 years after its release it’s still a very punishing game at its highest settings due to the amount of shading and memory those units require.

With Shogun 2 we see an immediate advantage for NVIDIA and the GTX 770 in particular. Where the 7970GE and GTX 680 were generally tied here, the GTX 770 pulls ahead by several percent. It won’t get GTX 770 to 50fps at 2560, but it at least gets it into the 40s.

Altogether this gives the GTX 770 a 19% advantage over the 7970GE. Meanwhile against past generation NVIDIA cards the difference is anywhere between 14% over the GTX 680, and coming very close to outright doubling the performance of the GTX 570. The GTX 680 comparison ends up being particularly interesting, as this is well ahead of where clockspeed alone should have pushed the GTX 770. In this case Shogun 2 seems to especially benefit from that extra memory bandwidth.

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  • karasaj - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    Nice! I heard that the 770 was going to perform much better than this, but I'm glad to see an improvement as well as lower prices. This might prompt a price cut by AMD, which could benefit everybody.
  • axien86 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    When the GTX 770 is so far behind even ancient cards in GPU compute and Folding... You know it is time to recall the overheating GTX 770 back to Nvidia and design something with real improvements.
  • freespace303 - Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - link

    80c load is quite common and safe for GPUs that have stock coolers. If those temps concern you, wait until these are released with aftermarket coolers installed.
  • tipoo - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    This really could have been called "680 gets bios update, price drop".
  • BeauCharles - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    Its not their top single GPU card, its their third place. The fact its tying with AMD's first place pretty much speaks for itself.
  • tipoo - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    Does "first place" matter, or do price points? If the 7970 was AMDs twentieth best card it still wouldn't change that it's competing with the 770s price point.
  • EJS1980 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    Even though a lot of AMD dudes will surely get butthurt with you, your point is right on. Heavy is the head...
  • tipoo - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    I'm not an "AMD dude", but I fail to see why that's right on. Price points matter, where the products rank within an individual companies line don't. If the 770 was Nvidias 100th best graphics card, at the same price/performance what would that change? Nothing.
  • EJS1980 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    I guess I should clarify that I was making a generalization, and wasn't referring to anyone in particular.
  • sna1970 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    what matters is how many FPS you get per dollar.

    who cares about getting flagships when you reach 60fps ? and how many people pay 4000$ for high end gaming machine ?

    I choose nvida over AMD for one reason , PhysX.

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