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)
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  • wallysb01 - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    And you're an N=1. Intel iGPUs are more than enough for plenty uses now, and have been for a while actually. I built a cheap office machine for my wife that we use also use for streaming, for example, I even played some DOTA on it for a time. That computer has the G3220 and it works just fine. HTPC, office/web, even a little light/cheap gaming... Intel iGPU is all you need. The extra $50+, power use and space (for those that want small form factors) for a dGPU is just thrown in the garbage and lit on fire for most computer use.
  • DanGer1 - Saturday, July 29, 2017 - link

    If you want to compare to an APU you will have to wait for Raven Ridge and I am pretty sure we all know what integrated Radeon graphics compare to Intel....no contest. It is my understanding that Raven Ridge will be coming out on 14nm+ as well. AMD will have a clear win in this segment.
  • KAlmquist - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    Currently, the lowest priced AM4 motherboard on Newegg is the ASRock A320M-HDV for $55 including shipping. There are a number of Intel LGA 1151 boards for less than that, starting with the GIGABYTE GA-H110M-M.2 for $48 and the ASRock H110M-HDS R3.0 for $51. So motherboard costs currently favor Intel at the low end. That said, the price differential is small, and may disappear over time as manufacturers recover their development costs.
  • DanGer1 - Saturday, July 29, 2017 - link

    Right, but you can overclock the R3 without needing to by a "K" and it comes with a cooler.
  • SlowSpyder - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    Looks like AMD aimed for the i5 7400, but priced it with the i3's. Not much to complain about here.
  • Otritus - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    The third(last) chart on the first page is listed as Comparison: AMD Ryzen 3 1300X when it should be Comparison: AMD Ryzen 3 1200
  • Otritus - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    On the second page it says fury x uses hdm not hbm
  • Drake H. - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    just missed the dolphin...
  • rocky12345 - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    Great review thank you.

    After watching a review on YT from AdoredTV and reading your review here I feel the R3 Ryzen's are pretty much what we all expected. They beat that useless Pentium CPU and duke it out with the i3's and the non K i5's. On AdoredTV he got the 1200 to 3.9Ghz and the 1300x to 4.0Ghz on the stock coolers with good temps. Once overclocked they really show their value in everything more so in the games. They both make the useless Pentium and the i3's look pretty sad.

    Another thing to look at is the R3's come with a stock cooler and are unlocked as well right their that adds value because unlike a K CPU you do not need to buy a cooler and if you get a Intel non K you can't make them faster by overclocking the Intel CPU's.
  • rocky12345 - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    Made a mistake it is Hardware Unboxed not AdoredTV I was referring to in my first comment. My bad sorry.

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