Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War – Enhanced Edition modder spawns over 40,000 Orks to see how far the game can be pushed

Relic Entertainment’s Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War – Enhanced Edition is a glorious return to one of the best RTS games ever made. As we explained in our Making Of interview earlier this week, Relic’s remaster brings the game back with improved performance, modern compatibility, enhanced mod support, better visuals and more.

Now a 64-bit program instead of a 32-bit one, the Enhanced Edition is capable of so much more than earlier versions of the Warhammer 40K RTS. With the 3GB RAM limit removed, modders can do more than ever before, and one has already pushed the game to its absolute limit.

Dawn of War – Enhanced Edition can spawn tens of thousands of Orks

Now that the game is in gamers’ hands, the team behind the long-updated Warhammer 40,000: Unification Mod for the Dawn of War’s Soulstorm expansion revealed just how far they can push the RTS game in this new version.

Spotted by IGN, mod developer Gunnisson showed that the game’s capability to spawn units is leagues and above the original game. The new RTS game easily handled 1,000 Orks with a crowd of more than 3,000 not only running wihtout issue, but also “pathing through each other exceptionally well”.

Gunnisson then pushed the unit count all the way to over 10,000 Orks on screen which did continue to run, albeit at single-digit levels of performance. However, the game didn’t crash and pathing continued with the modders calling the experiment a “win for performance and stability”.

But what is the actual hard limit for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War – Enhanced Edition? Despite the massive crowd of 10,000 Orks already plummeting the game’s performance, the modder continued to push forward until they found out how many of “da boyz” would crash the game.

After hours of testing, Gunnisson discovered the limit, and it’s far higher than you’d expect: 47,504. Due to the game’s performance after hitting the 10,000 unit mark, it took the modder over seven hours to more than quadruple the game’s unit count with the massive crowd of Orks causing the game to run at “10 seconds-per-frame” until crashing.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War – Enhanced Edition’s massive performance overhaul allows for some truly insane behaviour, although we don’t expect any mod to actually allow you to spawn over 47,000 units. With mods like Ultimate Apocalypse and the aformentioned Unification bringing unparalled chaos to the RTS game, modders now have more space than ever to bring their accursed creations to life.