Total War: Rome II, and thoughts
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Providing an excellent mix of strategy and action, Total War: Rome II's epic turn-based gameplay can swallow hours of your life.
Some games scale well from a 2,560x1,440 resolution to 3,840x2,160, others don't. It's perhaps surprising that the biggest percentage drop-off occurs in Total War: Rome II, with both GPUs losing about 55 per cent when moving between the top two resolutions.
Banging on a familiar drum, AMD retains a 10 per cent performance lead over the Titan at 2,560x1,440 and 3,840x2,160. Both are too slow for what we'd term comfortable framerates.
Still not fast enough, eh?
The 4K bandwagon first started rolling with gusto during this year's CES show in January. Nearing the end of the year, 4K monitors have begun cropping up. Pricing for this nascent technology remains expensive, at around £2,500 a pop, and the consensus is that we're at least 12 months away, possibly 18, before such monitors become what we call affordable.
So is it sensible to pair a 4K monitor to the very best single-GPU cards that money can buy? Our examination shows that super-smooth framerates and high/ultra-quality image settings simply don't mix well.
The pixel demands of 4K are too much for these cards to contend with. We'd hazard that you'd need to scale either card up by at least 50 per cent, perhaps more, for them to be powerful enough to cope with the graphically noisome combination of IQ and pixel-load. It's very unlikely that we'll see such an architecture available any time soon - we could be at least a year off - so those looking to invest in a 4K-capable rig will need to go down the multi-GPU path... and all the potential performance pitfalls - frame pacing, etc. - that accompany such a setup.
But hey, let's be pragmatic, if you're well-heeled enough to afford or justify a £2,500 4K monitor, dropping less cash on two Titans or substantially less for a pair of R9 290Xs shouldn't be too much of a financial problem.
If we were building a powerful PC today with the express aim of playing games, we'd go for the Radeon R9 290X and accompany it with a 27in, 2,560x1,440-resolution monitor that's commonly available for the same price as the card. Heck, you could probably squeeze both in for the price of a Titan.
