Creative Assembly Cuts Warhammer 3's End-Turn Wait by Up to 30%
Total War: Warhammer 3's Update 9.0 lands today, September 24, alongside the Lords of the End Times DLC. Creative Assembly says most of the work went somewhere players never see. Campaign end-turn times drop by up to 30%, largely by stopping the campaign AI from wasting its own turn.
The patch notes point to where that time was going. The AI now keeps a history of where it already tried and failed to recruit, instead of retrying the same failed recruitment every turn. Creative Assembly says that was driving both the slowdown and the "clumping" where multiple AI armies pile up around one settlement for turn after turn.
Alongside that fix, the studio reworked how the VFX system issues its commands to cut CPU overhead. It also batched the visual updates settlements make each turn, and optimized construction of the faction influence map and the granularity of worker-thread tasks.
Update 9.0 also fixes the game's TAA anti-aliasing mode. Creative Assembly says the fix resolves recurring flicker on the campaign map, most noticeable on coastal ice, heavy motion blur trailing siege towers and rams, and general ghosting on units.
None of this touches frame rate, though. Warhammer 3 still has no DLSS, FSR, or XeSS support running on its DirectX 11 renderer, a gap OC3D called a real frustration given how demanding the game gets at maxed-out settings.
Intel Open-Sources a DXVK Extension for Arc Graphics on Linux
Intel has quietly open-sourced dxvk-igdext, a small DLL that lets Direct3D 11 games use Intel's own graphics extensions, such as UAV overlap and MultiDrawIndirect. It works while running through Wine and DXVK on Linux, Phoronix reports.
Without it, a game built against Intel's extension SDK silently falls back to slower default D3D11 behavior instead of erroring out. The loss shows up as unexplained performance left on the table, not a crash a player would notice and report.
Valve's Proton already carries the fix. Its bleeding-edge branch builds dxvk-igdext as a submodule and copies the resulting igdext64.dll into the Wine prefix automatically. That means a Steam Deck or other Linux system running an Arc GPU through Proton gets the extension with no manual step.
Intel's own repository notes the project is Linux/Wine-only for now, with no equivalent path on native Windows.