The TWC Total War Benchmark thread - compare your real TW performance

[A Barbarian]

hi Nippy,
>> your CPU is not properly overclocked. If you have a NON STOCK Intel cooler choose sync all cores and raise max turbo to 45-42 ill it is running stable. Do not OC on a stock cooler Get the Arctic Freezer 13 if you, otherwise you wasted money for K CPU.

Be careful with recommendations for overclocking 4670K or 4770K CPUs. There is a lot of variance in voltage=temperature and overclocking capabilities for these Haswell processors. I am overclocking CPUs since ages (e.g. Celeron 300A from 300 to 450Mhz) and I never had so many problems as with my 4770K. My 2500K would to 4.7Ghz on a good (not high end) air cooler but for my 4770K even 4.3Ghz with a 240mm AIO water cooler are barely stable and I prefer 4.1 or 4.0 for daily usage due to the massive heat output. I certainly got one of the worse ones but there seem to be quite a few of those around.

He could be lucky with his CPU but for an overclocking beginner, I would only recommend 4.0 Ghz first. And only if the temperatures are not higher than 70 celsius in some burn test I would go any higher. And also never use any automatic overclocking above 4.0 Ghz. I saw some crazy voltages applied (1.5v in one instance) which can actually damage the CPU.

[Nippy]

Hi AlQamar
Sorry sent in the benchmarks only just built the PC so there is a few things i need to update,
On the Memory - not sure exactly what to do there as i haven't built a PC in quite a while so i forget a lot of this - went into BIOS but wasn't sure what to change.
Updated the Graphics card driver to latest one on Nvidia's driver list
I Have a H100i cooler for the 4770k but i think i have mounted it poorly as my temps are real bad need to check into this a bit more & fixed the display resolution -changed the threads to 16 must have read it wrong. Will try and fix these issues and resubmit
Best regards
Nippy

[A Barbarian]

Hi AlQamar
On the Memory - not sure exactly what to do there as i haven't built a PC in quite a while so i forget a lot of this - went into BIOS but wasn't sure what to change.
I Have a H100i cooler for the 4770k but i think i have mounted it poorly as my temps are real bad need to check into this a bit more & fixed the display resolution -changed the threads to 16 must have read it wrong. Will try and fix these issues and resubmit

Do you have any specific problems? Updating the BIOS is not necessarily the best thing to do. I have a Gigabyte Z87 board myself (the Z87X-OC) and I found that the early F4 BIOS is the most stable and issue free for me so far. Especially regarding the RAM I had more problems with later BIOS versions.

Your 4770K temperatures might be completely normal, even with a H100i. Haswell tends to get very hot especially should you have a 'high voltage' CPU like me. How high are the temperatures at which voltage (it's best to use CPU-Z version 1.64.0 and only that version), speed and which kind of load?

[alQamar]

Do you have any specific problems? Updating the BIOS is not necessarily the best thing to do. I have a Gigabyte Z87 board myself (the Z87X-OC) and I found that the early F4 BIOS is the most stable and issue free for me so far. Especially regarding the RAM I had more problems with later BIOS versions.

Your 4770K temperatures might be completely normal, even with a H100i. Haswell tends to get very hot especially should you have a 'high voltage' CPU like me. How high are the temperatures at which voltage (it's best to use CPU-Z version 1.64.0 and only that version), speed and which kind of load?

Perhaps that's the reason picking asus I never experienced a serious problem after upgrading a bios. Updates are for fixing bugs (and not necessarily all are documented) and update cpu microcodes (kind of firmware intel delivers for your cpu) to improve stability and performance, aswell they add compatibility to RAMs or CPUs that were not on the QVL list before, so don't see a reason to skip a update.

After some suggestions I made my thread a little bit more colorful to make it easier to read. Like it?

Also by tomorrow I try to make a video commentary and step by step instructions to help people that are not tech freaks running the benchmarks.

Can you please help him how to setup his xmp profile for RAM on that board barbarian?

[talljoe]

Do you have any specific problems? Updating the BIOS is not necessarily the best thing to do. I have a Gigabyte Z87 board myself (the Z87X-OC) and I found that the early F4 BIOS is the most stable and issue free for me so far. Especially regarding the RAM I had more problems with later BIOS versions.

Your 4770K temperatures might be completely normal, even with a H100i. Haswell tends to get very hot especially should you have a 'high voltage' CPU like me. How high are the temperatures at which voltage (it's best to use CPU-Z version 1.64.0 and only that version), speed and which kind of load?

I have a 4670k at 4.2 with an H100i and I haven't seen my temps go above 55c or so in Company of heroes 2 or Shogun 2, the two most cpu intensive games I have. Something is wrong with the mounting or the h100 itself.

[Anon052]

Sorry something went wrong with my last post, got en error when posting and I can't edit it. I hope it will work now.

[alQamar]

Sorry something went wrong with my last post, got en error when posting and I can't edit it. I hope it will work now.

thanks for your results, they helped us a lot. Please update your BIOS but AT LEAST AMD chipset and graphics card drivers. Both are outdated. Please run the GPU bench again and leave me a PM with results.

[Mr.Freud]

hey alQamar.
Yesterday I upgraded to win8 and noticed that my fps ingame(fall of the samurai) were lower. so I decided to run the cpu benchmark.
logs3win8.rar
I got about 2 fps less in comparison with win7
and now I've overclocked to 4.6Ghz
log4win8.rar
@4.6 I get 46 fps...

[alQamar]

not impossible. The results may change. Some game have advantages in Win8 some not but this FPS drops are not really critical. thanks for submission.

[gealany]

[...]AMD processors are literally not usable for Total War:[...]

This is nonsense. Its true, that Shogun runs faster on Intel-CPU's. But Shogun 2 is also running on a AMP-CPU very well!
Your benchmark is not representative. How many people playing Shogun with settings "ultra"? How many players have an monitor with this solution? You take only a small part of configurations. Im sure, that 90% from all Shogun 2 players do not play with this settings.

To say, AMD processors are not usable is simply not the truth.

[Mr.Freud]

To say, AMD processors are not usable is simply not the truth.

have u actually checked CPU benchmark results with AMD cpus @5.0 GHz??

[Dan113112]

What about this: http://www.yougamers.com/gameometer/10589/ ?

[SamueleD]

This is nonsense. Its true, that Shogun runs faster on Intel-CPU's. But Shogun 2 is also running on a AMP-CPU very well!
Your benchmark is not representative. How many people playing Shogun with settings "ultra"? How many players have an monitor with this solution? You take only a small part of configurations. Im sure, that 90% from all Shogun 2 players do not play with this settings.

To say, AMD processors are not usable is simply not the truth.

Most people want to play with either high or ultra unit sizes, for which you need a good CPU. The resolution doesn't have a really big effect on the CPU bench, we only used that one because 1900x1080 is the most common resolution on steam.
Also most people with an AMD CPU won't have an overclocked FX-8350, running at 5.0GHz, which is the only one to give a result that could be defined as playable.

Please, stop this pointless debate, we are not saying AMD is crap or something like that, we are just saying that AMD CPUs don't run TW as well as comparatively priced Intel CPUs, on the contrary, they are a lot slower, and that is a fact that any benchmark will confirm, as you can see for yourself.

The purpose of this thread is to collect data on the performance of various hardware in TW, in order to provide better informed suggestions for those who wish to buy new hardware, and give them an idea on how that hardware will run the game on fairly enjoyable settings (the ones used for the GPU benchmark). On the light of this we aim to suggest the best possible hardware for TW at a given price point. Apparently Intel CPUs are better suited to TW than AMD CPUs, at every price point.
If, in the future, AMD will produce CPUs that are better suited to TW than a comparatively priced Intel CPU, we will make sure to recommend those, in the meantime, we cannot, in all honesty, recommend a single AMD CPU for TW gaming.

Basically to run Shogun 2 well on an AMD CPU you need to lower unit sizes, but why would you want to do that, when you can get a similarly priced Intel CPU that will run them higher?

What about this: http://www.yougamers.com/gameometer/10589/ ?

It means very, very little. It compares hardware to the game recommended and minimum specs, which tend not to be exhaustive and often misleading, you are much better of comparing benchmarks.

[gealany]

[...]we are not saying AMD is crap or something like that[...]

AMD processors are literally not usable for Total War

Are you sure?

[SamueleD]

Are you sure?

Being unusable for something doesn't mean you are crap. AMD offers very good price/performance for heavily threaded applications, unfortunately for AMD TW is not one of those applications.

And yes, less than 20fps means constant lag in melee, which means unplayabe in a melee heavy game as Rome II, even more as the melee engagements will last longer than in Shogun 2. So AMD CPUs, unless heavily overclocked, are unusable for playing Rome II on a unit setting from large to ultra, which is what most people enjoy.

[Dan113112]

Being unusable for something doesn't mean you are crap. AMD offers very good price/performance for heavily threaded applications, unfortunately for AMD TW is not one of those applications.

And yes, less than 20fps means constant lag in melee, which means unplayabe in a melee heavy game as Rome II, even more as the melee engagements will last longer than in Shogun 2. So AMD CPUs, unless heavily overclocked, are unusable for playing Rome II on a unit setting from large to ultra, which is what most people enjoy.

I've never had too many issues playing TW using AMD. And I have the game set to Very High and Ultra settings and max unit sizes. I'm running an AMD Phenom II x6 1075T 3.0 GHZ processor. I also have 16.0 GHZ of RAM and a EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX560 Superclocked 2.0 GHZ.

When I last had my computer checked by a technician they played TWS2 on my rig on Ultra and they never had any problems.

AMD aren't crap as you say but I have to wonder if AMD having issues is the processor's fault or the game's for not being optimized at all for AMD. The sad part is more people seem to use AMD than Intel because they are cheaper.

[baldrick13]

Most people want to play with either high or ultra unit sizes, for which you need a good CPU. The resolution doesn't have a really big effect on the CPU bench, we only used that one because 1900x1080 is the most common resolution on steam.
Also most people with an AMD CPU won't have an overclocked FX-8350, running at 5.0GHz, which is the only one to give a result that could be defined as playable.

Please, stop this pointless debate, we are not saying AMD is crap or something like that, we are just saying that AMD CPUs don't run TW as well as comparatively priced Intel CPUs, on the contrary, they are a lot slower, and that is a fact that any benchmark will confirm, as you can see for yourself.

The purpose of this thread is to collect data on the performance of various hardware in TW, in order to provide better informed suggestions for those who wish to buy new hardware, and give them an idea on how that hardware will run the game on fairly enjoyable settings (the ones used for the GPU benchmark). On the light of this we aim to suggest the best possible hardware for TW at a given price point. Apparently Intel CPUs are better suited to TW than AMD CPUs, at every price point.
If, in the future, AMD will produce CPUs that are better suited to TW than a comparatively priced Intel CPU, we will make sure to recommend those, in the meantime, we cannot, in all honesty, recommend a single AMD CPU for TW gaming.

Basically to run Shogun 2 well on an AMD CPU you need to lower unit sizes, but why would you want to do that, when you can get a similarly priced Intel CPU that will run them higher?



It means very, very little. It compares hardware to the game recommended and minimum specs, which tend not to be exhaustive and often misleading, you are much better of comparing benchmarks.

actually i can play shogun 2 on max unit sizes with darthmod and still get a good framerate (true i am using shader model 3 high but i won't use model 5 until i get my new graphics card).

i'm used to console games so a framerate of 30-40 fps during a melee isn't unplayable for me.
on every total war game I've played i don't see how amd is so horrible.

[alQamar]

yes unfortunately. The framerate limit in cam close ups and unit blobs is itching. For campaign or small / medium unit size, this might not be a big issue. Would be cool if you can submit your benchmarks aswell gealany.

@Babydoc you sent me new results with blood disabled but forgot the number of thread tweak so I cannot use yours. CPU-Z would be needed aswell.


Why we are testing only ULTRA settings with all features enabled:

1. otherwise high end rigs would be even more bottlenecked and the comparison to low / mid end machines would be not possible
2. most of all players persist to believe they can play Shogun 2 / Rome 2 on ultra, but literally they have no idea what ultra means. Ultra is not clicking the ultra preset in Shogun 2, as then still some very consuming features are still off that make the game look better.
3. most players interested into an upgrade want to know if they can handle high or ultra settings. Thats why we show what is needed to run this fluently.

[alQamar]

I can understand your point of view. But you need to understand ours aswell. With ultra settings and DX11 AMD cpus are FAR behind Intel and 25 fps were generated by 5.0 GHz core literally a few have. The other one tested only have 15 fps and thats also below your 30-40 you are used to. Everything above 30 is fluent for the human eye.

[babydoc]

Check mail AQ