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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  • mapesdhs - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link

    You know what will happen there though, yet more accusations of conspiracy, etc.
  • lfred - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    Could anyone confirm the Wraith Prism cooler height 9.4cm , (and therefore wont fit a Silverstone Raven Z Mini-ITX case ) . thank you
  • psychok9 - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    Hello Ian, is there any news this week?
  • ET - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    I'm still waiting for the StoreMI page.
  • Sx57 - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    Well i am still waiting for anandtech updating the article.i am very interested to know how ryzen beat coffelake so well.i believe anandtech review is perfomed rightly but i wanna know what is actually wrong with other reviews that make intel winner in some games.it seems not to be the security patches related.
  • FaultierSid - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    Did they just silently switch out all gaming benchmarks? Intel 8700K now winning across the board.
  • rocky12345 - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    Yep they sure did they must have redone the tsts but this time turned on MCE for Intel and upped the memory clock to at least 3200MHz for Intel as well to see those kinds of gains in games from the old charts from last week. If they decide to explain it they will spin it that oh they had the wrong data points in the charts for Intel...lol
  • TEAMSWITCHER - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    Yes .. at 1080P. The 4K gaming results are rather mixed. So the original conclusion still stands for me. The AMD Ryzen 2700X is roughly on par with the 8700K at 4K gaming, and pulls ahead in productivity applications.
  • RafaelHerschel - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    Here is how I see it, at 1080p the new Ryzen results are good enough for 60 FPS gaming. The 2600 (non-x model) sometimes drops below 60 FPS but for a system that is equally used for productivity and gaming, I can certainly live with that. For a system that is mainly used for gaming, I still prefer Intel, but by a slimmer margin than before.
  • mapesdhs - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link

    You are hereby awarded the Sensible Chap medal for mentioning 60Hz gaming in at least a non-negtive manner. 8) A few pages back, one guy described anything below 144Hz as useless.

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