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

CPU Gaming Performance: Ashes of the Singularity Escalation CPU Gaming Performance: Rise of the Tomb Raider
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  • zuber - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    I disagree, he mentioned pretty much all the info you need to know about the CPU.

    The choice of GPU is hardly even relevant to CPU tests anymore. For gaming performance my 6 year old i7-2600K is neck and neck (or faster in some cases) than this new crop of CPUs.
  • mapesdhs - Friday, October 6, 2017 - link

    And if you do need more cores you can always move sideways to a very low cost SB-E or IB-EP. I built a 4.8GHz 2700K system for a friend two years ago, am upgrading it soon to a 3930K at the same clock, replacing the M4E mbd with an R4E, swapping the RAM kits (2x8GB for 4x4GB, both 2400MHz), total cost 200 UKP. 8) And the both mbds now have the option of booting from NVMe.

    Newer CPUs can have a distinct advantage for some types of 1080p gaming, but with newer GPUs the frame rates are usually so high it really doesn't matter. Move up the scale of resolution/complexity and quickly it becomes apparent there's plenty of life left in SB, etc. zuber, at what clock are you running your 2600K? Also note that P67/Z68 can benefit aswell from faster RAM if you're only using 1600 or less atm.
  • Itveryhotinhere - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    Not yet have power consumption graph ?
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    It's there: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11859/the-anandtech...
  • Itveryhotinhere - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    Thanks
  • Itveryhotinhere - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    That power consumption at full load already use boost or only at base clock ?
  • Ian Cutress - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    All-core turbo, as always.
  • SunnyNW - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    Can you please tell me how you got to the +20% frequency for CPU B in the twitter poll?
  • mkaibear - Friday, October 6, 2017 - link

    Yeah that doesn't make a lot of sense to me either.

    CPU A is the 8600K. Runs at a base of 3.6 and an all-core turbo of 4.1.
    CPU B is the 8700. Runs at a base of 3.2 and an all-core turbo of 4.3.

    That's either 11% slower (base) or about 5% faster (all-core turbo). Neither is 20%!

    If you compare the base speed of the 8600K and the all-core turbo speed of the 8700 then you get about 19.4% which is close enough to 20% I suppose but that's not really a fair comparison?
  • sonny73n - Friday, October 6, 2017 - link

    Nice pointing that out. But there still were about 1,800 blind votes ;)

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