PC Gamer writer Jared Walton recently posted an article describing how Total War: Warhammer performs on DX11 and DX12 with AMD and NVIDIA cards. The summary of the article is that Jared observed with the DX11 render path, NVIDIA scored quite well against AMD. But when you turn on DX12, AMD and NVIDIA score the same... but not in the way you think. AMD's best card, the Fury X, goes from about 75FPS to 95FPS. NVIDIA however goes from 135 FPS down to 92FPS. The rest of the article goes into calling into question why the performance in NVIDIA's cards drop that badly and Jared's conclusion is twofold: Total War: Warhammer is an AMD sponsored game, and thus gets more optimizations for AMD on the DX12 render path and that it's still beta, meaning NVIDIA's cards might get more performance.

Okay, enough of that, let's talk about stirring up controversy. A common thing I see when it comes to benchmarking games is that when NVIDIA comes out on top, the AMD camp likes to point fingers claiming that the developers were bought out by NVIDIA (which if it's an NVIDIA sponsored game, sure) or even as far as to say that the developers are sabotaging AMD users. But now the tables have turned. Would it be reasonable to claim that Creative Assembly was bought out by AMD and/or is deliberately sabotaging NVIDIA? Well if I were to make that claim, I'm sure the AMD camp would exclaim (and they are) that NVIDIA's hardware sucks and this is proof of it. But every time the NVIDIA camp makes the claim that AMD's hardware sucks, the camp continues to claim shilling.

The fact of the matter is, nobody really knows what's going on as to why NVIDIA is performing worse. If anything, DX12 shouldn't degrade performance that badly. You can't claim async compute because the GTX 1080 performs better than the R9 Fury X in Ashes of the Singularity, the poster child benchmark. Nothing can be definitively said until Creative Assembly or NVIDIA step up to say something (I don't trust AMD to say something because AMD's job is to make NVIDIA look bad).

But until then, happy finger pointing!