In the image below, you can see a screenshot from Total War: Attila showing the engine in full flow.

We don’t render terrain into the shadow map, but – as you can imagine for an RTS – we render tons of small meshes, compared to FPS/TPS game, which tend to render fewer, but more detailed meshes. We use cascaded shadow maps with 2-4 cascades depending on the graphics settings. We started every frame with rendering shadows from the main directional light. In the next post or two I will walk you through the major changes and optimizations we made during Total War: Warhammer. Let me start with a quick overview of the state of the rendering pipeline after we finished Total War: Attila. Porting to DirectX® 12 opened up new opportunities and helped us to better understand the graphics hardware. Working closely with AMD was a great help achieving our goals. We’re extremely lucky to have Tamas Rabel, Lead Graphics Programmer on the Total War series providing us with a detailed look at the Total War renderer as well as digging deep into some of the optimizations that the team at Creative Assembly did for the brilliant, Total War: Warhammer.ĭuring the development of Total War: Warhammer the primary focus of the Graphics Team was performance and stability. For the next few weeks we’ll be having a regular feature on GPUOpen that we’ve affectionately dubbed “Warhammer Wednesdays”.

Total war attila optimization