Disclosure: I purchased my own copy at Steam for this review.
Total War: WARHAMMER II was originally developed by Creative Assembly and was released for Windows last September 28, 2017. Feral Interactive released the Linux version on November 20, 2018 and it’s their 24th game for Linux since June 2014. Total War: WARHAMMER II is the 4th game to be released on Linux without support for OpenGL and only uses Vulkan.
Features
- Delve into a deeply engrossing campaign playing as one of eight Legendary Lords belonging to any of four awe-inspiring Races.
- Level up your military leaders — Legendary Lords and Heroes — and arm them with magical weapons and armour. Recruit vast armies and capture settlements, negotiate alliances or declare Total War to subjugate any that stand between you and your goal.
- Employ cunning military strategy or use brute force to turn the tide of combat and lead your forces to victory.
- Each of the Races in Total War™ WARHAMMER II will be playable in single and multiplayer campaign, plus custom and multiplayer battles. As the two Legendary Lords for each race all have their own unique campaign start positions, you’ll be able to play a 2-player co-op campaign as the same race. If you own both parts 1 and 2, you’ll be able to play in multiplayer as any of the races you own.
Test Results
Shown below is the built-in Battle Benchmark that was used for the performance testing. The built-in benchmark logs the frame time data and the log files are located at “.local/share/feral-interactive/Total War WARHAMMER II/SaveData/Steam Saves/benchmarks“. To those who want to do their own tests or replicate our results, watch our tutorial on how to derive the frame rate based from the frame time data.
The game features 4 image quality presets – Low, Medium, High, and Ultra. There are also individual graphics settings that you can tweak if you want to maximize performance. Low Preset was not tested because using it just to be able to play the game means a hardware upgrade is needed.
A high-end gaming PC is not required to enjoy Total War: WARHAMMER II if you will play at 2560 x 1080 resolution but it still requires a decent gaming PC. Radeon RX 580 8GB performs well in this game at 2560 x 1080 resolution using High preset. The CPU usage on my Core i7 7700 is about 30% only when Hyper Threading is disabled and RAM speed does not have a significant effect on performance.
The game officially supports only Ubuntu 18.04 LTS but I did not encounter any game crash or serious problem on my gaming PC running on Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS. Radeon RX 580 8GB runs this game without any graphical glitches on the Mesa 18.2.4 driver. This is another milestone for Linux gaming.
Related readings:
Rise of the Tomb Raider – Vulkan Performance Review
F1 2017 – Vulkan Performance Review
Closing Thoughts
Overall, I’m satisfied with the performance of Total War: WARHAMMER II. The game runs very well on mainstream hardware and Feral Interactive seems to be getting really good with implementing Vulkan for Linux games. More than a year and a half have passed since they first used Vulkan on Mad Max. Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Total War: THREE KINGDOMS were already confirmed for release on Linux in 2019 and Feral Interactive would likely use Vulkan. This current trend of Feral Interactive’s use of Vulkan further reinforces the fact that Linux is a viable gaming platform.
You can buy Total War: WARHAMMER II at Steam for ₱1,559.95 or at The Feral Store for $59.99 if you want to give more support to Feral Interactive and Linux gaming. Steam Play is supported which means you only buy it once and you can play it on Linux, and Windows. Remember to read this guide if you will make performance comparisons between Linux and Windows and you want to make sure your purchase counts as a Linux game sale.
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