I don't often buy AAA gaming titles close to release (or at all, to be honest), so I am not often useful for benchmarks on the latest games, but I love the Total War games, and Three Kingdoms has raving reviews, so I just had to buy it. As a result, I have some Three Kingdoms benchmarks from the Windows side of things, comparing my old Asus GTX980Ti Strix and a shiny new Palit Game Rock GTX1080Ti which I just picked up to replace it for 470$. I am not overclocking the cards beyond their factory settings. The Strix is a massively overclocked card with a 20% core overclock over a regular GTX980Ti, the Game Rock runs at nearly the same clocks as the reference design, so the difference between the two is smaller than between two reference cards of each type.

battle_benchmark - All of these are on external monitors, full-screen, with a second monitor active in windows. The same driver (430.97 - latest one available) is used for both cards:

Settings Ultra High Medium Low Asus GTX980Ti Strix Avg (Min) Avg (Min) Avg (Min) Avg (Min) 1920x1080 40 (31) 53 (39) 85 (59) 147 (96) 2560x1440 30 (24) 38 (30) 61 (48) 111 (78) 3840x2160 17 (14) 21 (18) 34 (29) 64 (49) 5120x2880 14 (12) 21 (17) 25 (22) 40 (35)

1080p is playable at High (Ultra is doable at 30fps).

1440p is playable at Medium (High is doable at 30 fps).

4K is barely bearable at Medium.

5K looks like crap and isn't worth it.

Settings Ultra High Medium Low Palit GTX1080Ti Game Rock Avg (Min) Avg (Min) Avg (Min) Avg (Min) 1920x1080 54 (40) 71 (46) 103 (64) 165 (101) 2560x1440 42 (33) 54 (40) 86 (61) 147 (96) 3840x2160 25 (21) 31 (26) 52 (42) 93 (70) 5120x2880 16 (13) 21 (17) 33 (28) 61 (49)

1080p is playable at High. Ultra is doable with FPS dips.

1440p runs decent on High and very well on Medium.

4K is doable on Medium. Low is too ugly to be worth it. This is a pretty good setting, as Medium looks good and 4K on a 27" monitor looks very crisp.

5K is doable at ~30 FPS on Medium. Not worth it, to be honest.

There are three interesting things here:

1) The High preset behaves weird, providing the same results at 4K and 5K on the GTX980Ti, and an identical 5K result on both cards, which no other preset does.

2) The best GPU scaling is on the medium and high presets at 2K and 4K. Ultra settings scale worse and I suspect that a lot of the extra eye-candy (probably things like unit sizes) is either CPU bound, or uses extra CPU computation, which means that the TB3 latency has a greater effect. With all due respect to my i7-7820HK, it isn't as fast as a desktop 8700K or 8600K, which is what most of the desktop benchmarks are done with.

3) The minimum frame rates in the benchmarks are nearly universally achieved at the end of the scene when a lot of foliage is on screen. In other words, if you're not staring at trees, but rather at your units, your FPS is likely going to be higher than this.

Desktop Comparison:

Let's compare to desktop results. Surprisingly there isn't a lot of good data I could find on the GTX1080Ti performance, but be can extrapolate from a GTX1080. The GTX1080Ti is ~30% faster than the GTX1080 on average, so lets see how I fared. This is on the High preset:

1080p: 91 (71) vs 71 (46)

1440p: 56 (48) vs 54 (40)

4K: 27 (23) vs 31 (26)

Likewise, here, GTX1080Ti results are missing and the same is true for a GTX1080 (Why wouldn't they try to find two of the most popular cards out there is beyond me), but a GTX1070Ti makes its appearance, and it is a card that is very close to a GTX1080 in performance, so we can use it instead:

At 1080p, the 1070Ti result is 64fps on average on Ultra (no minimum specified) vs my 54.

At 1440p, they have 55fps on average on high (again, no minimum specified) vs my 54. On Ultra, the performance is all by identical to mine, with 42 average FPS, and a minimum around 37-ish. I have 42 (33).

At 4K on medium, the 1070Ti has 43 FPS vs my 52. At high the frame rate is 26fps (identical to the GTX1080 result above) vs my 31.

Conclusions:

1) 1080p a desktop with a GTX1080/1070Ti outperforms my GTX1080Ti eGPU setup by a lot, setting minimum frame rates that are equal to my averages. Getting a high-end card for a 1080p eGPU is a fool's errand, but not one we were not aware of.

2) At 1440p on High, I am suffering about a 30% performance hit compared to the desktop, with a bigger hit on the minimum frame rates, as my card becomes essentially equivalent to a GTX1080 or so.

3) At 4K on Medium, my card pulls ahead closer to its expected performance advantage, being ~20% faster.

4) At 4K on High the GTX1080Ti pulls ahead in both average and minimum frame-rates, and the performance hit compared to the desktop is about 15%, but the performance of both cards is poor.

5) On Low graphics the game looks like crap. Medium looks pretty good. The gains from Ultra over High are very hard to spot and are probably not worth it.

It is hard to say how much of this is to blame for the TB3 connectivity and how much of this is to blame on the weaker CPU compared to the faster desktop benchmarks, since the Total War games are CPU intensive both on the campaign level and in the battle view, but the eGPU fares better on the Medium setting and higher resolutions. Medium at 4K is a particular sweet spot, and gives a hint about what I should focus on when tweaking settings.

There is also a helpful article here about the performance impact of various graphics settings over here. Spoilers: Shadows and AA reduce frame rates a lot, and unit sizes are also an important consideration. The impact of settings on eGPU performance may be different than on a desktop and is worth looking into, so:

I plan to compare the effect of the various settings on the performance of my setup so we can recommend the eGPU crowd which settings we should avoid. I will use the GTX1080Ti and try to narrow down the effect of each setting between Medium and the higher settings (Low is not worth my time). Stay tuned!

As usual: I buy a game, and then spend more time benchmarking it than playing it, but I can't help it: FOR SCIENCE!