Total War: Rome II, 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.
Total War: Rome II continues to pummel the cards when playing at 4K. Both cards lose more than 50 per cent performance when moving from 2,560x1,600 to ultra-high 3,840x2,160, which makes sense as the pixel count is effectively doubled.
There's hardly anything separating the performance of the two cards, but it's worth noting that memory usage was recorded as 3,030MB on the GeForce and 3,137MB on the Radeon. Considering the price tag and the product positioning, we'd really liked to have seen Nvidia equip its card with a larger frame buffer.
Thoughts
It's become clear that today's most powerful graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD will struggle to cope with the demands of 4K gaming.
Mixing more than eight-million pixels with high image-quality settings is about as stressful as it gets for modern-day 3D visuals, and, if we had to guess, we'd say we're at least a year away from single-GPU graphics cards being able to put forth the level of performance required to deliver buttery-smooth framerates at an extreme 3,840x2,160.
Then again, if you're willing to put down £3,000 or so on a 4K monitor, you're probably going to want to pair it with at least two GPUs. That's the sort of muscle we suspect you're going to need, and to find out for certain, we've put a second GeForce GTX 780 Ti into our test platform. Two of Nvidia's latest in SLI at 4K sounds promising indeed, so stay tuned, we have dual-GPU 4K benchmarks coming soon.
