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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  • Santoval - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    It's possible that the first consumer Intel 8-core will be based on Ice Lake. Cannon Lake will probably largely limited to low power CPUs, and will probably top out at 4 cores. Of course if Ice Lake is delayed again Intel might scale out Cannon Lake to more cores. Cannon Lake will be just a 10nm node of the Skylake/Kaby/Coffee Lake architecture, so it will most likely provide mostly power efficiency gains.
  • aliquis - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    Latest road map show coffee lake refresh in Q4.
  • mahoney87 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    lol :D
    https://imgur.com/SmJBKkf
    They done fecked up
  • Luckz - Monday, April 23, 2018 - link

    Rocket League is a joke game when it comes to benchmarking, optimization and so on.
  • Chris113q - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    Do you really need to be spoon-fed information? How long would it take you to find the other reviews by yourself?
    PCPER, Tweaktown, Toms Hardware, Hothardware, Computerbase all had different results (can't post link due to spam protection). Not to mention you'd have to be totally tech illiterate to believe that stock 2600 can beat 8700k by such a huge margin. Meltdown/Spectre patches don't affect gaming performance that much, so don't you put blame on that.
    The result discrepancy is embarrassing, there goes the last speck of reputation Anandtech had as a reliable source of tech news.
  • MuhOo - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    You sir are right.
  • Aegan23 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    You do know who Ian is, right? XD
  • sor - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    Anandtech has no responsibility to go out and ensure their results match up with anyone else’s. They run their own selection of tests with their own build and report the numbers. They provide the test setup, if you can’t spot the differences that’s your own issue.
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    "Anandtech has no responsibility to go out and ensure their results match up with anyone else’s"

    Responsibility? No. But should we anyhow? Yes.

    Our responsibility is accuracy. If something looks weird with our data - which it does right now - then it's our job to go back, validate, and explain the results that we're seeing. If our results disagree with other sites, then that is definitely an indication that we may have a data issue.
  • xidex2 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    I bet none of the other sites applied spectre and meltdown patches for Intel because they dont care about such things. Intel fanboys are now crying because someone actually showed true numbers.

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