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)
Comments Locked

347 Comments

View All Comments

  • lefty2 - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    except that they haven't
  • Dr. Swag - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    How so? You have the performance numbers, and they gave you power draw numbers...
  • bongey - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    Just do a avx512 benchmark and Intel will jump over 300watts , 400watts(overclocked) only from the cpu. (prime95 avx512 benchmark).See der8auer's video "The X299 VRM Disaster (en)"
  • DanNeely - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    The Chromium build time results are interesting. Anandtech's results have the 1950X only getting 3/4ths of the 7900X's performance. Arstechnica's getting almost equal results on both CPUs, but at 16 compiles per day vs 24 or 32 is seeing significantly worse numbers all around.

    I'm wondering what's different between the two compile benchmarks to see such a large spread.
  • cknobman - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    I think it has a lot to do with the RAM used by Anandtech vs Arstechnica .
    For all the regular benchmarking Anand used DDR4 2400, only the DDR 3200 was used in some overcloking.
    Arstechnica used DDR4 3200 for all benchmarking.
    Everyone already knows how faster DDR4 memory helps the Zen architecture.
  • DanNeely - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    If ram was the determining factor, Ars should be seeing faster build times though not slower ones.
  • carewolf - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    Anandtech must have misconfigured something. Building chromium is scales practically linearly. You can move jobs all the way across a slow network and compile on another machine and you still get linear speed-ups with more added cores.
  • Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    We're using a late March v56 code base with MSVC.
    Ars is using a newer v62 code base with clang-cl and VC++ linking

    We locked in our versions when we started testing Windows 10 a few months ago.
  • supdawgwtfd - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Maybe drop it then as it is not at all usefull info.
  • Johan Steyn - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    I refrained from posting on the previous article, but now I'm quite sure Anand is being paid by Intel. It is not that I argue against the benchmarks, but how it is presented. I was even under the impression that this was an Intel review.

    The previous article was stated as "Introducing Intel's Desktop Processor" Huge marketing research is done on how to market products. By just stating one thing first or in a different way, quite different messages can be conveyed without lying outright.

    By making the "Most Powerful, Most Scalable" Bold, that is what the readers read first, then they read "Desktop Processor" without even reading that is is Intel's. This is how marketing works, so Anand used slanted journalism to favour Intel, yet most people will just not realise it eat it up.

    In this review there are so many slanted journalism problems, it is just sad. If you want, just compare it to other sites reviews. They just omit certain tests and list others at which Intel excel.

    I have lost my respect for Anandtech with these last two articles of them, and I have followed Anandtech since its inception. Sad to see that you are also now bought by Intel, even though I suspected this before. Congratulations for making this so clear!!!

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now