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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  • sorten - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Swole? Threadripped?
  • Rottie - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    AMD Ryzen CPU is not fast enough. Apple is not ready for AMD Ryzen CPU, sorry AMD. I love AMD but I hated Intel even though I have a Skylake based MacBook Pro. :(
  • Deshi! - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    One small correction, Ryzen has 24 PCIE lanes, not 16. it has 16 for graphics only, but saying only 16 may make people (like me) wonder if you can't run an NVME at x4 and still have the graphics card at 16x, which you totally can do.
  • Deshi! - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    This is under Feeding the beast section btw, where you said "Whereas Ryzen 7 only had 16 PCIe lanes, competing in part against CPUs from Intel that had 28/44 PCIe lanes,"
  • fanofanand - Tuesday, August 15, 2017 - link

    He already answered this question/statement to someone else. there are 20 lanes from the CPU, 16 of which are available for graphics. I don't think his way of viewing it seems accurate, but he has stated that this is how PCIe lanes have been counted "for decades"
  • WaltC - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Nice review, btw! Yes, going all the way back to Athlon and the triumph of DDR-Sdram over Rdram, and the triumph of AMD's x86-64 over Itanium (Itanium having been Intel's only "answer" for 64-bit desktop computing post the A64 launch--other than to have actually paid for and *run* an Intel ad campaign stating "You don't need 64-bits on the desktop", believe it or not), and going all the way back to Intel's initial Core 2 designs, the products that *actually licensed x86-64 from AMD* (so that Intel could compete in the 64-bit desktop space it claimed didn't exist), it's really remarkable how much AMD has done to enervate and energize the x86 computing marketplace globally. Interestingly enough it's been AMD, not Intel, that has charted the course for desktop computing globally--and it goes all the way back to the original AMD Athlon. The original Pentium designs--I owned 90MHz and 100MHz Pentiums before I moved to AMD in 1999--were the high-point of an architecture that Intel would *cancel* shortly thereafter simply because it could not compete with the Athlon and its spin-off architectures like the A64. That which is called "Pentium" today is not...;) Intel simply has continued to use the brand. All I can say is: TGF AMD...;) I've tried to imagine where Intel would have taken the desktop computing market had consumers allowed the company to lead them around by the nose, and I can't...;) If not for AMD *right now* and all the activity the company is bringing to the PC space once again, there would not be much of a PC market globally going on. But now that we have some *action* again and Intel is breaking its legs trying to keep up, the PC market is poised to break out of the doldrums! I guess Intel had decided to simply nap for a few decades--"Wake me when some other company does something we'll have to compete with!" Ugh.
  • zeroidea - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Hi Ian,
    On the Civ 6 benchmark page, all results after the GTX 1080 are mislabeled as GTA 6.
  • Ahmad Rady - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Can you try to test this CPU using windows server?
    This is a MCM CPU looks like 4 CPUs attached to each other.
    I think windows 10 Pro can't get the most of this CPU unless we have windows 10 Pro for WS
  • Pekish79 - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Vray has a Rendering Benchmark too maybe you could use both
  • Pekish79 - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    I went to check both page of Vray and Corona Benchmark

    Corona match more or less the graphic and Vray has the following

    AMD 1950 : 00:46-00:48 sec
    I9 7900: 00:54-00:56 sec
    I7 6950: 01:00-01:10 sec
    I5 5960: 01:23-01:33 sec

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