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. 

For all our results, we show the average frame rate at 1080p first. Mouse over the other graphs underneath to see 99th percentile frame rates and 'Time Under' graphs, as well as results for other resolutions. 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 6GB Performance


1080p

4K

Sapphire R9 Fury 4GB Performance


1080p

4K

Sapphire RX 480 8GB Performance


1080p

4K

Gaming Performance: Ashes of the Singularity Escalation (1080p, 4K) Gaming Performance: Rise of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 4K)
Comments Locked

140 Comments

View All Comments

  • dave_the_nerd - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    Yes, obviously. That would be terrible.
  • Oxford Guy - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    I'm glad you're not a tech reviewer. You could just say "Obviously" for every technical detail and that would be your article.
  • Gothmoth - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    you can overclock the cheap AMD cpus... what about the intels?

    i am to lazy to check but are the testets intels k models? i guess not.
  • ddhelmet - Friday, July 28, 2017 - link

    One thing I am really curious about is Citra performance. It would be an important test for single thread performance. All about that IPC.
  • serendip - Friday, July 28, 2017 - link

    Sorry but I don't see the point of these chips. An i3 is supposed to be a cheap do-everything CPU for basic business and school PCs. The Ryzen 3 not having a GPU really hurts its chances in those segments and it probably won't get picked up by OEMs. AMD needs mass market sales right now and Ryzen APUs can't come soon enough.

    I'm also wondering if yields are good enough that Ryzen 7s are the main chips being produced, with few 5s and 3s left over from the 7s that didn't meet spec.
  • Outlander_04 - Saturday, July 29, 2017 - link

    The core count of the Ryzen chips is going to be a significant advantage over any dual core .

    Adding a basic graphics card will cost about $30 . For that you free up system RAM that the onboard would otherwise be using, and you get decent drivers that let you make some adjustments that intel removed when they dumbed down their drivers a few years back
  • serendip - Saturday, July 29, 2017 - link

    Yeah but most office tasks run fine on 2 cores. Most users probably won't even notice they're using quad core processor.

    That $30 extra is a lot when it comes to speccing thousands of machines. A cheap discrete GPU is also another potential point of failure that large enterprises might not want on a big rollout. I understand the enthusiast reasoning for a cheap but powerful CPU like the Ryzen 3 paired with a decent midrange card, but this setup doesn't make sense for large corporate orders. AMD needs to sell lots of chips to large clients to survive.
  • Outlander_04 - Saturday, July 29, 2017 - link

    It's not just the "Office tasks". Its the network services, antivirus and updating that goes on in what should be the background, but is not when you have a dual-core. I speak from experience. The HP desktops we have at work can be frustrating.
  • buxe2quec - Friday, July 28, 2017 - link

    Posting a review with placeholders for the benchmarks is definitely not professional.
    Delay it two days and post it in full, or split it in two reviews.
    Looks like clickbaiting...
  • supdawgwtfd - Friday, July 28, 2017 - link

    Ian. Your a shill. Or you just completely biased.

    Every single other review i have read has said the Ryzen 3 it the better option. In price and performance.

    WTF has happened to Anandtech? Why are you guys spewing BS? Why can't you be unbiased?

    Seriously?

    Have been reading the site for almost 20 years. I think i will now have to officially NOT come here again...

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now