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
Comments Locked

222 Comments

View All Comments

  • Ian Cutress - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link

    Should be sorted now. Found a small issue, pages should be loading in sub 2 seconds.
  • anubis44 - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link

    "Not sure why there is no R5 1600 in the test though. It will be good to see how the 6 cores solution compete."

    It's essentially as you'd expect. In older, single-threaded code, the Intel CPU has a slight advantage, but in any newer, multi-threaded code, the Ryzen 5 1600's hyperthreading 6 cores will dominate. It's time to stop giving Intel money for fewer cores. They don't deserve the cash. Give it to AMD for a change, now that they're genuinely competitive.
  • rtho782 - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    Annnd stock is unpossible to find...

    Complete paper launch.
  • Ian Cutress - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    Newegg seems to be accepting orders.
  • rtho782 - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    I'm british! :P

    OcUK put all their allocation (30 pcs) into binned delidded cpus at £499/£599/£799

    The others are all gone.
  • krumme - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    8700k is in backorder there. And for the rest of the world?
    I can get a 8400 in my country. 8700k seems to come 2 dec.
    I cant remember anything similar for the last 3 decades. Perhaps the P3-1000.
    If this is not a paper launch nothing is.
  • bill.rookard - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    If you want a P3-1000 I have one I can sell you! Fully working with motherboard. LOL. I think it also has a whopping 256MB RAM.
  • watzupken - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    I think I read somewhere that mentioned that supply will be limited, especially at the start.
  • mapesdhs - Friday, October 6, 2017 - link

    Gotta love the way searching on Amazon for 8700K brings back the 7700K (as opposed to simply, Not Found). By grud their search engine is bad. :D
  • FourEyedGeek - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link

    Bad for them?

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now