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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  • mapesdhs - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link

    I'm not sure. :D It's certainly annoying though. Worst part is searching for anything and then changing the list order to cheapest first, what a mess...
  • SunnyNW - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    "That changes today."

    Anyone else read that and think that it is something we should have been reading ages ago?
    Consumer technology is progressing slower than many expected and I feel the same way. Nonetheless I can't help but envision a Very near future where I'll be coming back and reading this article and being depressed at this level of technology all the while on my future monolithic many thousand core 3D processor ;)
  • KAlmquist - Friday, October 6, 2017 - link

    Yes. A year ago this would have been an exciting development. Now it's just Intel remaining competitive against AMD's offerings.
  • Valcoma - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    "The Core i5-8400 ($182) and Core i3-8350K ($169) sit near the Ryzen 5 1500X ($189) and the Ryzen 5 1400 ($169) respectively. Both the AMD parts are six cores and twelve threads, up against the 6C/6T Core i5 and the 4C/4T Core i3. The difference between the Ryzen 4 1400 and the Core i3-8350K would be interesting, given the extreme thread deficit between the two."

    Those AMD parts are 4 cores, 8 threads.
  • Ian Cutress - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    You're right, had a brain spasm while writing that bit. Updated.
  • kpb321 - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    Still off

    "The difference between the Ryzen 5 1500X and the Core i3-8350K would be interesting, given the extreme thread deficit (12 threads vs 4) between the two."

    the 1500X is a 4c8t processor so it effectively has hyper-threading over the i3-8350K while having a lower overclocking ceiling and lower ipc.
  • Zingam - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link

    Drinking too much Coffee, eh?
  • hansmuff - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    Ian, I love the way the gaming benchmarks are listed. So easy to access and much less confusing than drop-downs or arrows. Nice job!
  • Valcoma - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    Are you sure that the i5-7400 got 131 FPS average in benchmark 1 - Spine of the Mountain in Rise of the Tomb Raider? Besting all the other vastly superior processors?

    Looks like a typing error there or something went wrong with your benchmark (lower settings for example on that run).
  • Ian Cutress - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    I've mentioned it in several reviews in the past: RoTR stage 1 is heavily optimized for quad core. Check our Bench results - the top eight CPUs are all 4C/4T. The minute you add threads, the results plummet.

    https://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/1827

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