Napoleon Total War offers a few significant technical/graphical improvements over Empire. There is better multi-core support which improves performance and the variation of soldiers and naval rigging onscreen. Additionally the new unit rendering system offers a greater variety of units, giving us up to 64 per unit compared to 4 in previous games. Particle effects are also enhanced with 5x the number of particles in any given effect compared to the last Total War game and post processing is used more effectively for climate, season and weather effects.
It doesn’t stop there though, Creative Assembly have added subtle lens flare and camera vignette to the battlefield lighting model and re-implemented SSAO to work as a light attenuator rather than a full screen effect. Finally there are enhancements such as weather dependant particle effects (mist/fog, dust and leaves) as well as parallax-mapped high detail terrain and heat hazes as required.
Testing was performed at 1680x1050 with no anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering. Maximum in-game settings were enabled.
It is fair to say, based on the above information that the Total War engine has received quite an overhaul with Napoleon and the 5830, even in this early stage, handles it fantastically at 1680x1050. We can enable 16x anisotropic filtering and maximum game detail and the framerates still remain perfectly smooth. The same cannot be said for the GTX 275 which has a few drops below 25fps and as a result, some stuttery gameplay.
Comparing the 5830 to the 5770 we can see that there is a significant difference in performance between the two cards, it would take a significant drop in detail or resolution to get playable framerates on the lower specification card.
