Middle-Earth: Shadows of Mordor at 3 GHz

The final title in our testing is another battle of system performance with the open world action-adventure title, Shadows of Mordor. Produced by Monolith using the LithTech Jupiter EX engine and numerous detail add-ons, SoM goes for detail and complexity to a large extent, despite having to be cut down from the original plans. The main story itself was written by the same writer as Red Dead Redemption, and it received Zero Punctuation’s Game of The Year in 2014.

For testing purposes, SoM gives a dynamic screen resolution setting, allowing us to render at high resolutions that are then scaled down to the monitor. As a result, we get several tests using the in-game benchmark, taking results as the average and minimum frame rates.

For this test we used the following settings with our graphics cards:

Shadow of Mordor Settings
  Resolution Quality
Low GPU Integrated Graphics 1280x720 Low
ASUS R7 240 1GB DDR3
Medium GPU MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB 1920x1080 Ultra
MSI R9 285 Gaming 2G
High GPU ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB 1920x1080
3840x2160
Ultra
Ultra
MSI R9 290X Gaming 4G

Shadow of Mordor on ASUS R7 240 DDR3 2GB ($70)

Shadow of Mordor on MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB ($245)

Shadow of Mordor on MSI R9 290X Gaming LE 4GB ($380)

Shadow of Mordor on MSI R9 290X Gaming LE 4GB ($380)

Shadow of Mordor on ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB ($560)

Shadow of Mordor on ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB ($560)

Carrizo takes miniture solace here in that it beats the Kaveri CPU at 4K with a GTX 980, albeit within the margin of error. SoM typically performs very similar no matter the processor, especially on NVIDIA cards. We haven't included the R9 285 results, as there seems to have been a recent update pushing values 30% higher than expected for the Kaveri on this GPU, and given the results trend it would seem to be more than simply L2 or PCIe lane difference, especially to the Trinity/Richland parts.

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  • Lolimaster - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    They really shoot themselves up allowing those 15w TDP configs with their "high end" APU's.
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    That was my point about AMD building their own mobile ecosystem instead of letting OEM's destroy their reputation even more with cr*aptastic offerings.
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  • albert89 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Well better late than never for Andantech, but still a great review. As for AMD's Zen, there is much to celebrate and everything they have learned from Kaveri & Carrizo will be put into Zen. But most importantly is AMD's move to 14nm. Which means most reviewers will, for the first time, be comparing apples with apples. Its been a long road for AMD but now that they are here, I can only expect that in many areas of computing they'll give Intel a run for their money and the consumer a taste of the benefits of competition.
  • osxandwindows - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Yeah, right.
    Keep dreaming.
    Hehe.
  • euskalzabe - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    I'd say the most important part isn't the move to 14nm - that would've happened anyway at this point in time - but the abandonment of the Bulldozer design, finally, into a new CPU microarchitecture and adoption of Intel-like hyperthreading. That's what will shoot AMD CPUs back into competition.

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