Total War: Warhammer - Graphics analysis and new features

Creative Assembly's latest addition to the Total War series - Total War: Warhammer, has taken the strategy genre by storm. The developers believe it to be the greatest Total War game they've ever made, and I think everyone would agree without a doubt that it is.

Its fusion with Games Workshops, Warhammer is the perfect crossover and has enticed strategy gamers like they've never before. The numbers add weight to this fact as it has been recorded as the fastest selling Total War game ever. The first few days after release sold over half a million copies and the game has been regularly topping 100,000 concurrent players on Steam.

One of the most talked about aspects of Total War: Warhammer is its graphics. NVIDIA is working with Creative Assembly in order to improve the performance on its graphics cards and there isn't yet a Game-Ready driver for it . The game has been tested over a large range of hardware by numerous groups and has produced some great results.

On first look, the game looks just amazing in terms of graphics and is bound to get you impressed. A huge number of options are provided to the players and they can tweak and adjust a lot of visual settings to suit their system. Some of these options actually affect the CPU.

The games in the Total War series have always known to be extremely intensive on CPUs that lacked good multithreading support. The developers have chosen to implement DX 12 this time with the aim to resolve that issue. As mentioned, they haven't been able to utilize DX 12 yet, but they have mentioned that it will be available soon.

PC Game Benchmarks released a video on YouTube that reveals quite a significant difference in frame rates between the lowest and the highest graphic settings. Take a look at the video and see the difference.

As it is revealed in the video, in terms of battle size, the frame rate drops only by 5 when there is a huge number of units in the game. This means that the size of the battle you are having will not result in a drastic weight down on performance. There is a significant difference in how the game looks on ‘low’ as compared to ‘ultra’.

The difference is in terms of terrain and texture and a number of units look completely different. Such as the General’s portrait which looks skinnier if set to high.

Eurogamer strategy king Chris Bratt points out that in comparison to the previous titles released in the series such as Rome 2 and Atilla, Warhammer has been noted to run in a more stable state. Here’s his performance video of the game:

You cannot disagree – the game does look quite good.

New features

Creative Assembly had earlier released Atilla after Rome and there weren’t many changes . Warhammer, on the other hand, has tons of new stuff. In terms of mechanics, the game runs like clockwork and the graphics are great.

Apart from those, the campaign mechanics are now smoother and building an empire is more fun and less strenuous. Food, sanitation and fertility have been removed and public order is the only number in this title that requires tracking. Warhammer also introduces corruption, which is brought upon by certain factions.

Heroes replace agents from the previous Total War games. They are quite similar to agents except for a new ability - Action , which lets them join in the fight. They are very strong, look awesome and have special abilities. Heroes also collect followers, weapons, armour and gear, which can be equipped to your hero.

The Al is fairly better than before, although slight stupidity is inevitable. There are numerous new units which bring their own unique flairs into the battlefield, and this makes the battles more different than earlier.

The five races or factions, also have unique features to them and the game does increase its lifespan as you can play as the other factions. However, the end result requires you to beat the Chaos Faction. There is even more to the title but you will have to play it yourself to uncover everything.

Total War: Warhammer is available on Steam for Rs 1,999.