Anatomy Of The Total War Engine - In depth look at TW:WH Engine Optimization

[Bacon1]

For the next few weeks we’ll be having a regular feature on GPUOpen that we’ve affectionately dubbed “Warhammer Wednesdays”. 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.

During the development of Total War: Warhammer the primary focus of the Graphics Team was performance and stability. Working closely with AMD was a great help achieving our goals. Porting to DirectX® 12 opened up new opportunities and helped us to better understand the graphics hardware.

DirectX® 12
We knew it won’t be a trivial task so we started working on the DirectX 12 port quite early during development. Warhammer is still using the same architecture as Attila or Rome 2. Our device abstraction is just a very thin layer on top of the DirectX 11 interface. This meant that the DirectX 12 port basically sits on top of a DirectX 11 interface. We started out in this very naïve way, which then led to lots of valuable insight.

http://gpuopen.com/anatomy-total-war-engine-part/

http://gpuopen.com/anatomy-total-war-engine-part-2/

http://gpuopen.com/anatomy-total-war-engine-part-3/

Looks like lots of great info in those posts, just skimmed them and will take another look tomorrow but figured people here would like to know more about how the engine was designed