by Shawn Sanders — Wednesday, July 27, 2016

ASUS Strix Radeon R9 Fury And The State Of DirectX 12 Performance

Total War: WARHAMMER, Thoughts and Conclusion

Published by SEGA and developed by Creative Assembly, Total War: WARHAMMER is a top-down turn-based strategy game set in the fantasy world of WARHAMMER. It features wide-scale battles in large open settings, similar to Ashes of The Singularity, with hundreds of units on screen at a single time.

Total War: WARHAMMER

DirectX 11 & 12 Gaming Performance

We tested Total War: WARHAMMER with Ultra settings with FXAA on, and Depth of Field and Screen space Reflections off.

Total War: WARHAMMER shows nice performance improvements across the board as a result of the heavier inter-CPU/GPU workload rendering so many combat AI units in a scene. Our ASUS STRIX Radeon R9 Fury sees a full 10% boost in performance under the new API.

DirectX 12 is finally here and it is being used in an increasing number of games but the paint is still far from dry. The closer-to-metal access to hardware with DirectX 12 will not always lead to the same kind of performance gains in all game titles, just like we saw here in our quick series of tests. However, it should be quite interesting to see how devs make use of the new API going forward, whether it be to increase performance or visual impact.

ASUS STRIX Radeon R9 Fury

We focused solely on performance here but DirectX 12 also offers resources for developers to make optimizations and enhancements to lighting, textures and other visual features. That said the titles tested here, in their current versions, do not yield any significant visual enhancements over their DX11 counterparts.

More efficient use of resources, with the potential for increased performance and better visual fidelity are some of the promises of DirectX 12. Judging from these tests we aren't there quite yet but the future for DirectX 12 looks bright.