Creative Assembly details CPU & GPU optimizations for Total War: WARHAMMER


Creative Assembly has released more PC tech details about Total War: WARHAMMER. According to the team, Total War: WARHAMMER has been optimized so it can take advantage of multiple CPU cores. This basically means that the game will scale better on multiple CPU cores, meaning that it will not suffer from single-threaded limitations/issues.

“Total War has traditionally been quite CPU-bound, with the game-draw and graphics render processes both running on the same CPU thread.” wrote Creative Assembly in a new post and continued.

“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.”

Creative Assembly has also shifted its 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.”

As a result of these changes, the game scales better now on multiple CPU cores.

“Long story short: all of this means we’re using the CPU and the GPU more efficiently. TW: Warhammer takes better advantage of multicore CPUs, balancing the load across the cores so that no single core is maxed out and limiting framerates while others sit idle.”

Total War: WARHAMMER will also support DX12. While DX12 won’t be available at launch, Creative Assembly has worked with AMD and will release a patch that will add support to it.

“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!”

Total War: WARHAMMER releases on May 24th, so stay tuned for more!