TOTAL WAR WIKI

Total War: WARHAMMER – DX12 beta

Update 1 for Total War: WARHAMMER will be live on the 30/06 at 2pm BST, and once you’ve downloaded it, our beta version of DX12 will be available to try in-game. Alongside a ton of other optimisation work (see here for details), we’ve been working closely with AMD on implementing DX12, and the results are very promising.

So what is DX12? In short, it’s the latest DirectX graphics API from Microsoft – an interface which manages how the drivers, the game code and your PC hardware interact to generate the visual aspect of games, and it’s only available for Windows 10.

DX12 differs quite significantly from previous DirectX versions. Rather than auto-managing a lot of the processes as DX11 and earlier did, DX12 exposes many of the functions of the graphics card so that developers like us can get hands-on with them, and program more efficient ways of using them. That’s why DX12 is known as a ‘low-level’ API – it lets us get closer to directly controlling how the hardware and drivers work with our game, and gives us a lot of scope to make it work better.

A number of cards are already DX12 compatible, as you can see from the table below. However, there’s a feature of DX12 that requires a specific piece of GPU architecture to leverage, and that’s Asynchronous Compute. Async Compute enables the game-code to run tasks in parallel on the GPU, rather than in a single queue – the upside being better efficiency of task execution, and consequently higher framerates.

In readiness for DX12, AMD have been building Async Compute functionality into their GPUs for quite some time now, including the new RX480. This means that, while some earlier-gen cards are technically DX12 compatible, you’ll see more DX11-to-DX12 performance gains across a greater range of AMD cards, as they get the benefit of Async Compute and therefore parallelize tasks better.

Via Update 1 we’ve also added in benchmarking functionality for both DX11 and DX12 modes, so you can run your own before-and-after benchmarks and see whether your card performs better under DX11 or DX12. The benchmarker can be found in the Advanced Graphics Options in-game.

As for what this means in terms of performance gains, well – it depends entirely on your GPU. Switching to DX12 mode, you’ll see greater gains on AMD cards generally speaking, much of which is down to AMD’s support for Async Compute across a broad range of cards. But what’s worth noting is that thanks to all the non-DirectX optimisation we’ve done, plus much of the DX12 work unrelated to Async Compute, we’re seeing excellent performance in DX11 too.

Our work on DX12 is ongoing and there are some outstanding issues still to solve, so we’re keeping it as a beta feature for now – you can read about these issues in our Update 1 notes here. You can now switch between DX11 and beta DX12 modes in the Advanced Graphics Options, but first thing’s first, check to ensure your PC meets the system requirements:

• Operating System: Windows 10
• Operating System minimum version: 10.0.10586
  • To find out your OS version:
    • Click on the Windows start button
    • Type ‘Run’ in the search bar – open the ‘Run’ Desktop app
    • Type ‘CMD’ – hit ‘OK’
    • At the top of the CMD window that opens, you can see your current windows version number.
• Graphics Card drivers: Latest available driver is highly recommended
• Graphics Card from the list of supported GPU’s below

DX12 compatible cards

Manufacturer	GPU	Async compute?
AMD	RX480	Yes
AMD	Radeon HD 7790	Yes
AMD	Radeon HD 8770	Yes
AMD	Radeon R7 260	Yes
AMD	Radeon R7 260X	Yes
AMD	Radeon R9 290	Yes
AMD	Radeon R9 290X	Yes
AMD	Radeon R9 295X2	Yes
AMD	Radeon R7 360	Yes
AMD	Radeon R9 380	Yes
AMD	Radeon R9 380X	Yes
AMD	Radeon R9 390	Yes
AMD	Radeon R9 390X	Yes
AMD	Radeon R9 Fury	Yes
AMD	Radeon R9 Nano	Yes
AMD	Radeon R9 Fury X	Yes
AMD	Radeon Pro Duo	Yes
Nvidia	GeForce GTX 950	No
Nvidia	GeForce GTX 960	No
Nvidia	GeForce GTX 970	No
Nvidia	GeForce GTX 980	No
Nvidia	GeForce GTX 980 Ti	No
Nvidia	GeForce GTX Titan X	No
Nvidia	GeForce GTX 1070	?
Nvidia	GeForce GTX 1080	?