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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  • bsp2020 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    Was AMD's recently announced Spectre mitigation used in the testing? I'm sorry if it was mentioned in the article. Too long and still in the process of reading.

    I'm a big fan of AMD but want to make sure the comparison is apples to apples. BTW, does anyone have link to performance impact analysis of AMD's Spectre mitigation?
  • fallaha56 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    Yep, X470 is microcode parched

    This article as it stands is Intel Fanboi stuff
  • fallaha56 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    As in the Toms article
  • SaturnusDK - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    Maybe he didn't notice that the tests are at stock speeds?
  • DCide - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link

    I can't find any other site using a BIOS as recent as the 0508 version you used (on the ASUS Crosshair VII Hero). Most sites are using older versions. These days, BIOS updates surrounding processor launches make significant performance differences. We've seen this with every Intel and AMD CPU launch since the original Ryzen.
  • Shaheen Misra - Sunday, April 22, 2018 - link

    Hi , im looking to gain some insight into your testing methods. Could you please explain why you test at such high graphics settings? Im sure you have previously stated the reasons but i am not familiar with them. My understanding has always been that this creates a graphics bottleneck?
  • Targon - Monday, April 23, 2018 - link

    When you consider that people want to see benchmark results how THEY would play the games or do work, it makes sense to focus on that sort of thing. Who plays at a 720p resolution? Yes, it may show CPU performance, or eliminate the GPU being the limiting factor, but if you have a Geforce 1080 GTX, 1080p, 1440, and then 4k performance is what people will actually game at.

    The ability to actually run video cards at or near their ability is also important, which can be a platform issue. If you see every CPU showing the same numbers with the same video card, then yea, it makes sense to go for the lower settings/resolutions, but since there ARE differences between the processors, running these tests the way they are makes more sense from a "these are similar to what people will see in the real world" perspective.
  • FlashYoshi - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    Intel CPUs were tested with Meltdown/Spectre patches, that's probably the discrepancy you're seeing.
  • MuhOo - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    Computerbase and pcgameshardware also used the patched... every other site has completely different results from anandtech
  • sor - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    Fwiw I took five minutes to see what you guys are talking about. To me it looks like Toms is screwed up. If you look at the time graphs it looks to me like it’s the purple line on top most of the time, but the summaries have that CPU in 3rd or 4th place. E.G. https://img.purch.com/r/711x457/aHR0cDovL21lZGlhLm...

    At any rate things are generally damn close, and they largely aren’t even benchmarking the same games, so I don’t understand why a few people are complaining.

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