The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X Review: CPUs on Steroids
by Ian Cutress on August 10, 2017 9:00 AM ESTShadow of Mordor
The next title in our testing is a battle of system performance with the open world action-adventure title, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (SoM for short). Produced by Monolith and using the LithTech Jupiter EX engine and numerous detail add-ons, SoM goes for detail and complexity. 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.
A 2014 game is fairly old to be testing now, however SoM has a stable code and player base, and can still stress a PC down to the ones and zeroes. At the time, SoM was unique, offering a dynamic screen resolution setting allowing users to render at high resolutions that are then scaled down to the monitor. This form of natural oversampling was designed to let the user experience a truer vision of what the developers wanted, assuming you had the graphics hardware to power it but had a sub-4K monitor.
The title has an in-game benchmark, for which we run with an automated script implement the graphics settings, select the benchmark, and parse the frame-time output which is dumped on the drive. The graphics settings include standard options such as Graphical Quality, Lighting, Mesh, Motion Blur, Shadow Quality, Textures, Vegetation Range, Depth of Field, Transparency and Tessellation. There are standard presets as well.
We run the benchmark at 1080p and a native 4K, using our 4K monitors, at the Ultra preset. Results are averaged across four runs and we report the average frame rate, 99th percentile frame rate, and time under analysis.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
1080p
4K
ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6G Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire Nitro RX 480 8G Performance
1080p
4K
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launchcodemexico - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Why did you end all the gaming review sections with something like "Switching it to Game mode would have made better numbers..."? Why didn't you run the benchmarks in Gaming mode in the first place?Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Gaming mode is not default, and we run gaming mode alongside the default - there's two sets of values in each graming test.DanNeely - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
You might want to call that out more clearly in the text. I also missed that you have two sets of 1950X results; and probably wouldn't've figured out what the -G suffix meant without a hint.Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
I mentioned it in the Game vs Creator mode page, but I'll propagate it through.lordken - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
read before you complain, it is stated at beginning of the review that -G is for game mode...DanNeely - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Especially during the work day a lot of people just are doing quick glances at the most interesting parts. I'll end to end read it sometime tonight.mapesdhs - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
If people quick-glance, that's their problem for missing key info. :D When learning about something as new as this, I read everything. Otherwise, it's like the tech equivalent of crossing a road while gawping at a phone. :}Last time I read so much about a new CPU launch was Nehalem/X58.
Ian.
smilingcrow - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
It seemed really clear to me but for people who didn't read the long text on NUMA etc maybe not.The dangers of skimming!
mapesdhs - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Indeed. :D Reminds me of when a long time ebay seller told me that long item decriptions are pointless, because most bidders only read the first paragraph, often only the first sentence.Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
The test suite is a global glove: rather than have 20 tests for each segment, it's a global band of 80 tests for every situation. Johan does different tests as his office is several hundred miles away from where I am (and we're thousands of miles away from any other reviewer).For the gaming benchmarks, there are big differences in 99th percentile frame rates and Time Under analysis. As games become more and more GPU bottlenecked for average frame rates, this is where the differentiation point is. It's a reason why we still test 1080p as well. With regards the AI test, I've asked the Civ team repeatedly to make the AI test accessible from the command line so I can rope it into my testing scripts easily (they already do it with the main GPU test). But like many other game studios, getting them to unlock a flag is a frustrating endeavor when they don't even respond to messages.