GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB Review

Strategy games are well-known for pushing the limits of any system, and few others do this as well as Total War: SHOGUN 2. It fully supports DX11, has huge battlefields to overlook with hundreds or thousands of units, and a ton of graphics options to adjust. It’s quite simply a beast of a game.

Manual Run-through: While we normally dislike timedemos, because strategy games such as this are very difficult to benchmark reliably, we’ve opted to use the built-in benchmark instead.

I mentioned before that Metro 2033 can punish PCs worse than Battlefield 3, but SHOGUN 2 is another such game that can hold that distinction. The number of tweaking options made available to the user is rather incredible (as seen on page two of this article), so if your GPU isn’t up to the task with the settings you’ve punched in, you have a lot of leeway. Just don’t expect to get into the game right away if you find yourself on a quest to find the “perfect” arrangement of settings.

Not surprisingly, 1080p was truly brutal to our GTX 650 Ti. A quick fix is to hit the Very High preset, then disable tessellation. You can then expect to run the benchmark at about 62 FPS on average.