Shadow 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

CPU Gaming Performance: Ashes of the Singularity Escalation (1080p, 4K) CPU Gaming Performance: Rise of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 4K)
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  • bigboxes - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    You're acting just like the fanboi trolls you claim to loathe.
  • Alexvrb - Sunday, August 13, 2017 - link

    Yeah that was definitely a pot<->kettle comment. LOL.
  • trivor - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link

    For those of you considering this CPU the fact is you are going to get MUCH better value by choosing one of the Ryzen CPUs - Ryzen 7 1800X is now at around $420 for 8/16 and the 7 1700 (8/16 again) has been on sale for as little as $299. Now, if you need the high thread counts for work on things like content creation and you still want to be able to run games it will be competitive (read: not the king of the hill) when you are running your games. So, if you do more than 50% of your computing time is gaming then go for an Intel CPU OR one of the Ryzen 5/7 consumer CPUs.
  • Lord of the Bored - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Which would explain why the introduction doesn't mention the Netburst fiasco by name.

    "The company that could force the most cycles through a processor could get a base performance advantage over the other, and it led to some rather hot chips, with the certain architectures being dropped for something that scaled better. " is, to my eye, actually attention-grabbing in the way it avoids using any names like Preshott, I mean Prescott and only obliquely references the 1GHz Athlon, the Thunderbirds, Sledgehammer, and the whole Netburst fiasco that destroyed the once-respected Pentium name.

    But no, let's just say that "certain architectures" were dropped and there were "some rather hot chips" and keep Intel happy. They need that bone right now, though not as much as they did during the reign of Thunderbird and the 'hammers.
  • Hurr Durr - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    If the unword "NetBurst" triggers you so much, it`s not processors you should spend money on, but shrinks.
  • Lord of the Bored - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Hey, we were an Athlon house. I didn't suffer through the series of mis-steps that plagued Intel. I just thought the sentence was conspicuous in how hard it tried to not name names.
  • mlambert890 - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link

    "name names"? There are 2 companies that make CPUs. Everyone knows Netburst was Intel P4 era. It's not Watergate ok?

    Conspiracy obsession has become a legitimate mental illness.
  • fallaha56 - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    handy not to show the new Intel chip struggle eh?
  • Breit - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Is it possibly to bench the Intel CPUs (especially the i9-7900x) for those latency/single-thread tests with Hyperthreading turned off? This would probably give a better comparison to AMDs Game Mode and hopefully higher numbers too due to double the cache/registers available to one thread.
  • cheshirster - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Skylake-X sucks at gaming.
    7800X is slower than 1600X.

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