Everything that we’ve seen so far seems to suggest that the upcoming Total War: Warhammer game is going to be a huge hit. Even though the game is based on DirectX 11 by default, it looks like it will eventually receive support for DirectX 12, which is very good news for the gaming community. However, the developers have pointed out that DX12 support will only arrive after the game has been launched, which means that they are still working on optimizing everything in order to give us a smooth experience. It makes sense for games such as this to feature DX12, as they show off a lot of units on the screen at the same time, and that’s exactly where the new API is supposed to shine.
“We’re pleased to confirm that Total War: WARHAMMER will also be DX12 compatible, and our graphics team has been working in close concert with AMD’s engineers on the implementation. This will be patched in a little after the game launches, but we’re really happy with the DX12 performance we’re seeing so far, so watch this space!”
The team has also provided some insight into the optimization process, which involved balancing out workloads across multiple CPU cores in order to make sure that each core is used efficiently.
“Total War has traditionally been quite CPU-bound, with the game-draw and graphics render processes both running on the same CPU thread. Over time, as the engine has evolved and become more demanding, this has become an increasingly important bottleneck for us. During the course of TWWH’s development, we’ve spent time separating these so they now run independently on their own threads. We’ve also optimized our task-system to have better multi-threading performance across the board.
In GPU terms, we’ve shifted our particle simulation pipeline from the pixel shader to the compute shader, which is a more efficient use of the GPU’s time. In fact we’ve done this with several parts of the rendering pipeline, further utilizing the GPU and letting the CPU focus on everything else it has to do.”
Apparently, the game’s engine was also switched from 32-bit to 64-bit, and even though this won’t likely bring any performance benefits, it will allow the devs to go past 2GB memory limitations. Overall, it looks like we have a lot of things to be excited about when it comes to Total War: Warhammer. The game is scheduled to come out on May 24.
