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


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4K

ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6G Performance


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Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G Performance


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Sapphire Nitro RX 480 8G Performance


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CPU Gaming Performance: Ashes of the Singularity Escalation (1080p, 4K) CPU Gaming Performance: Rise of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 4K)
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  • blublub - Sunday, August 13, 2017 - link

    From what I have read is that all TR do 3.9hhz and some even 4-4.1ghz on all cores .

    What are your temp when running all 10c @4.6ghz prime for 1-2hrs
  • Zingam - Sunday, August 13, 2017 - link

    Ian, how about testing mobile CPUs - for games and for office work. Aren't mobile CPUs selling much larger numbers thatn desktop ones these days?
    I can't find a single benchmark comparing i5-7300hq vs i7-7700hq vs i7-7700K showing the difference in productivity workloads and not just for rendering pretty pictures but also for more specific tasks as compiling software etc.

    I also would like to see some sort of comparison of new generation to all generations upto 10 years back in time. I'd like to know how much did performance increase since the age of Nehelem. At least from now on there should be a single test to display the relative performance increase over the last few generations. The average user doesn't upgrade their PC every year. The average user maybe upgrades every 5 years and it is really difficult to find out how much peformance increase would one get with an upgrade.
  • SanX - Sunday, August 13, 2017 - link

    I agree, there must be 5-7 years old processors in the charts
  • SanX - Sunday, August 13, 2017 - link

    Why one core of Apple A10 costs $10 but one core of Intel 7900x costs 10x more?
  • oranos - Sunday, August 13, 2017 - link

    so its complete dogsh*t for the segment which is driving the PC market right now: gaming. got it.
  • ballsystemlord - Sunday, August 13, 2017 - link

    Hey Ian, you've been talking about anandtech's great database where we can see all the cool info. Well, according to your database the Phenom II 6 core 1090T is equally powerful when compared to the 16 core threadripper!!!!!!! http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1932?vs=146
    With those sorts of numbers why would anyone plan an upgrade?
    (And there is also only one metric displayed, strange!)
    Not to play the Intel card on you as others do, but this is a serious problem for at least the AMD lineup of processors.
  • jmelgaard - Monday, August 14, 2017 - link

    o.O... I don't know how you derived that conclusion? you need a guide on how to read the database?...
  • BurntMyBacon - Monday, August 14, 2017 - link

    For anyone looking for an overall fps for two pass encoding here is your equation (hope my math is correct):
    FPS = 2*FPS1*FPS2/(FPS2+FPS1)

    No, you can't just average the FPS scores from each pass as the processor will spend more time in the slower pass.

    For the x264 encoding test, for example, a few relevant FPS scores end up being:
    i9-7900X: 122.56
    i7-7820X: 114.37
    i7-6900K: 95.26
    i7-7740X: 82.74

    TR-1950X: 118.13
    TR-1950X(g): 117.00
    TR-1920X: 111.74
    R7-1800X: 100.19

    Since two pass encoding requires both passes to be usable, getting an overall FPS score seems somewhat relevant. Alternately, using time to completion is would present the same information in a different manner. Though, it would be difficult to extrapolate performance results to estimate performance in other encodes without also posting the number of frames encoded.
  • goldgrenade - Thursday, January 4, 2018 - link

    Take all those Intel FPS performance counters and multiply them by .7 and you have what their chips actually run at without a major security flaw in them.

    Let's see that would be...

    i9-7900X: 85.792
    i7-7820X: 80.059
    i7-6900K: 66.682
    i7-7740X: 57.918

    And that's at best. It can be up to 50% degradation when rendering or having to do many small file accesses or repeated operations with KAISER.
  • Gastec - Tuesday, August 15, 2017 - link

    I've having a hard time trying to swallow "Threadripper is a consumer focused product" line considering the prices to "consume" it: $550 for the MB, $550 for the TR1900X ($800 or $1000 for the others is just dreaming) then the RAM. The MB(at least the Asus one) should be $200 less, but I get it, they are trying to squeeze as much as possible from the...consumers. Now don't get me wrong and I mean no offence for the rich ones among you, but those CPU are for Workstations. WORK, not gamestations. Meaning you would need them to help you make your money, faster.

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