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

Gaming Performance: Civilization 6 Gaming Performance: Rise of the Tomb Raider
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  • SaturnusDK - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    Surely you mean widening the performance gap. It was already ahead in professional and multi-threaded workloads. Now it's miles ahead.
  • MajGenRelativity - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    I was referring to single-threaded performance. As for multi-threaded workloads, you are right
  • fallaha56 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    Like which ones?

    After the Spectre2 patch the Intel scores have been hammered...

    And no doubt with proper default settings on MCE as well
  • jjj - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    Very odd choice to only include the Intels with high clocks in the charts, it's like you wanted to put all Intels at top in ST results, make it look better than it is.
  • Luckz - Monday, April 23, 2018 - link

    I'm afraid there are physical space limits regarding how much hardware Ian can fit in his domain. It's been popular to recycle scores from previous tests among sites, but after "Smeltdown" (and with Nvidia drivers being all over the place) it doesn't work that way right now. In an ideal world you'd compare five or ten different setups, sure.
    But then you'd not just want 8400 @ B360 but also 8700k OC, 2600k OC, 4770k OC, etc...
  • T1beriu - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    Typo: "Cycling back to that Cinebench R15 nT result that showed a 122% gain". I think the gain is just 22%.
  • SirCanealot - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    Wow. I'm actually excited to read a review for the first time in a long time! Fantastic review as usual!

    I'm still sitting on my 3770k @ 4-4-4.7ghz and I'm likely to try delidding for fun and see if I can push it any more. But this review makes me excited to look forward to perhaps building a Ryzen 2/3 (whatever the heck they name it) this time next year!

    AMD has caught up to Intel another vital few paces here! If Intel sits on their butts again next year and AMD can do the same thing next year, this is going to get very, very interesting :)
  • SmCaudata - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    I'm sitting on a 2500k. The geek in me wants to upgrade, but I've really no need until Cyberpunk finally releases. Maybe zen 5 by that time.
  • Lolimaster - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    You can upgrade to the new 400 mobos, it will be compatible with any Ryzen released till 2020.
  • Luckz - Monday, April 23, 2018 - link

    Four times the threads though, four times.

    Depends on what you do, of course :)

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