Total War ROME II – PC performance graphics benchmarks of Graphics Cards

BASIC GAME INFORMATION

 

Year of construction: 2013
Genre: Strategy (Real-time / Turn-based) / 3D
developer: The Creative Assembly
Publisher: SEGA
Platform: PC

 

Take command of the most powerful army of the Ancient World, transform your country into a great empire and force your enemies to bow to your military, economic and political power. Of course, some will admire your successes, while others will envy you; it is possible that your closest associates will be among the latter.

Will the traitors manage to stab you in the back, or will you be the first to oppose your old friends? How much are you willing to sacrifice to ensure that Rome becomes exactly what you want it to be? Once you take on the title of Emperor, will you defend the Republic or turn into a brutal dictator?

THE GRAFICAL PART

This subsection of our review highlights the main graphical aspects of this game. Particular attention is paid to the version of the graphics engine used, the version of the API used, graphic settings and the quality of development of the main visual aspects.

Supported OS and graphics API

Total War ROME II is supported by the main Windows operating systems, which include Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Other operating systems are not currently supported by the developers. 

 

The preferred graphics API for the multiplayer game Total War ROME II is DirectX 11. The game is distributed through the digital gaming service Steam.

Game engine

Total War ROME II is based on the Warscape game engine. Warscape is a game engine developed by the British company The Creative Assembly for internal use in its Total War games. Warscape is intended for use only on personal computers running Microsoft Windows. The first game to use Warscape was Empire: Total War, the fifth game in the Total War series, and was released on March 3, 2009.

Beginning with 2004’s Rome: Total War, Total War games used the Total War engine, which was used until 2007’s Medieval II: Total War – Kingdoms. After this, it was decided to create a new engine – “Warscape”, the first game on which was “Empire: Total War” in 2009.

 

During the development of Napoleon: Total War, the engine was “well polished,” Craig Laycock of The Creative Assembly told Armchair General. However, during the development of Total War: Shogun 2, the engine was further redesigned and significantly improved. The main innovation was support for DirectX 11 and some AMD technologies: Eyefinity and CrossFireX.

 

“Total War: Shogun 2” was promoted by AMD as part of a marketing campaign for HD 6xxx series video cards as a game that actively uses the capabilities of DirectX 11. However, a few days before the game’s release, it became known that it would not contain a DX11 mode. The developers stated that they did not have time to finalize this mode, and it will be released later as a patch. The heavily modified Warscape engine in Total War: Rome 2 made it possible to view exotic cities in the smallest detail, and the new camera makes it possible to observe the battlefield from any angle.

Advanced Game Settings

Total War ROME II has a very wide range of graphic settings. The game has both standard and advanced graphics settings. We can change the graphic settings aboutt minimum and up to maximum quality levels.

Below we have provided screenshots of the game at various graphics settings, where our readers can see the difference between the minimum, medium, and maximum graphics quality settings. 

Low quality settings

Medium quality settings

Maximum quality settings

As we can see, the difference between different quality settings is quite significant and with maximum graphics the picture is the most attractive.

General visual design and game physics

The Total War series is PC exclusive, and this means that game graphics are one of the first places for developers in the process of implementing the next game. And Total War ROME II was no exception in this regard – the graphics in the game are simply stuffed with all sorts of bells and whistles and all sorts of details, from which we can say that the game will make any modern top-end hardware “boil”…

 

Of course, the Total War series has never seen anything like this before: the game locations have become thoroughly detailed, the game world has acquired more realism, the units are more diverse, and the battles are simply epoch-making. Just look at the new mode of combined sea and land battles!

 

But we all know that you have to pay for beauty, and then we will move directly to gaming tests and determine what impact this game has on modern computer hardware.

TEST PART

GPU test

All video cards were tested at maximum graphics quality using MSI Afterburner. The purpose of the test is to determine how video cards from different manufacturers behave under the same conditions. The performance indicator was taken as the average and minimum FPS of the in-game benchmark. Below is a video of the test segment:   

Our video cards were tested at separate screen sizes of 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 at the maximum graphics quality settings allowed by Total War ROME II. Multi-chip configurations from NVIDIA and AMD have absolutely no support in the game. And if SLI does not react to the game at all, then Cross Fire with the new 13.10 downloads goes into the negative, and in the previous version 13.8 it was incredibly laggy, which was expressed in screen flickering and disappearing textures. Therefore, we still strongly advise you to disable Cross Fire, which was done in all the corresponding video cards in our review – they worked in tests on the same chip.

 

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920×1080 

 

At a resolution of 1920×1080 at maximum settings, an acceptable level of performance was shown by video cards of the Radeon HD 7850 level or GeForce GTX 480. The optimal solutions will be level Radeon HD 7950 or GeForce GTX 660 Ti.

Testing at maximum quality settings 2560×1600

 

At a resolution of 2560×1600 at maximum settings an acceptable level of performance was shown by video cards Radeon HD 7970GE or GeForce GTX 770. The optimal solutions will be level GeForce GTX 780 and higher.

VRAM test

Testing of video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the program MSI Afterburner. The indicator was based on results on top video cards from AMD and NVIDIA with separate screen sizes 1920×1080 and 2560×1600.

Testing at maximum memory GPU quality settings 

 

The recommended amount of video memory for this game Total War ROME II is about 1536 MB for standard resolutions and at least 2048 MB for ultra-high resolutions.

Micro-Stuttering Test

 

 Introducing our testing of FPS output latency on a Micro-Stuttering monitor. The indicator was based on the results on video cards from AMD ARES II and NVIDIA GTX 780 at a resolution of 1920×1080 with maximum image quality settings.

Testing at maximum Micro-Stuttering GPU quality settings

 

Micro-Stuttering latencies for NVIDIA video cards are at an acceptable level, but for AMD things are slightly worse…

CPU test

 We tested processor dependence on 15 models of basic configurations that are relevant today. The test in most cases was carried out in places where the value of video cards for the game was minimal and its load was less than 99%, at a resolution of 1920×1080 with maximum graphics quality settings.  

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920×1080

 

As we can see, Total War ROME II leaves almost no chance for anyone. The only more or less comfortable solution is the top six-core model from Intel. All other solutions coped with the game with a stretch… In the graphics we showed the overclocked results of top-end Intel and AMD processors.

Loading of processor cores at maximum quality settings 1920×1080 Intel%

 

Loading of processor cores at maximum quality settings 1920×1080 AMD%

 

Total War ROME II uses all available resources of the CPU cores, but loads them unevenly, which indicates not very high-quality optimization, because the game requires quite large resources that are not literally required by the source code. 

RAM test

Testing of the RAM consumed by the game was carried out by monitoring directly through the Windows task manager. The test was carried out on the basic configuration of Core i 7 [email protected] GHz with 16GB DDR3 2400 MGz pre-installed memory.

Testing at various quality settings

 

As we can see, with various basic quality settings, the amount of RAM consumed in Total War ROME II is at the level of 1000 megabytes. Thus, for a comfortable game you need to have 2 minimum GB of RAM installed in your PC. 

So, in conclusion from our review, we want to draw the following conclusion – the performance of the Total War ROME II game depends more on the CPU than on video cards. The maximum that today’s top-end CPU Core I 7 [email protected] GHz can handle is video cards of the Radeon HD 7950 or GeForce GTX 660 Ti level. The minimum FPS can be increased to a maximum of 38 frames, but only if this model is overclocked to almost 5 GHz, which is not a feasible solution for the average user.

Extreme overclocking of Core I 5/7 can give a more or less stable 25 FPS, but again, you overclock at your own peril and risk. We write this to the fact that we have already met many users on the forums who, in the dream of a comfortable game in Total War ROME II, are running for new video cards, but we warn you that the bottleneck of Total War ROME II is the central processor and replacing the video system can give zero results . So, dear comrades, we are waiting for patches that improve optimization in the game.

With the release of the first beta patch for Total War ROME II and its hotfix, the performance situation has remained virtually unchanged. AMD has released drivers version 13.10, flickering and juddering in Cross Fire mode are gone, but the performance strangely goes downhill, so activating it is not relevant. They also added an overclocked FX 8350 to 4.5 GHz, which gave it virtually no increase in performance…

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