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.

 

ASRock RX 580 Performance

Shadow of Mordor (1080p, Ultra)Shadow of Mordor (1080p, Ultra)

Shadow of Mordor (4K, Ultra)Shadow of Mordor (4K, Ultra)

GPU Tests: Civilization 6 GPU Tests: Rise of the Tomb Raider
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  • rocky12345 - Monday, June 11, 2018 - link

    They used to but Intel coolers are so bad that no one used them so instead of making one that was usable for the k CPU's they just stopped including them. At least the other guys include them still and 2 of the 3 are actually usable as coolers. Personally I would rather have some sort of cooler included so at least would be up and running if the high end air or water cooler was om back order or waiting on shipping at least can get the system built and running.
  • Flunk - Monday, June 11, 2018 - link

    The ones they sent out with the older -K series processors were a joke. My i5-2500K came with a cooler that couldn't even cool it within Intel's specs running stock in a cold room.
  • mkaibear - Tuesday, June 12, 2018 - link

    I'm still using the one which came with my 4790K and it works fine, and the one my 2500K came with also worked fine when I had it, even at 30C ambient temps in the middle of summer.

    Probably an installation error there Flunk.

    (yes, I bought K series processors and never overclocked them, for both of these my intention was to downclock them for reduced heat and noise but never got round to it with the 2500K and the 4790K didn't really downclock very well so I couldn't be bothered!)
  • jimmysmitty - Friday, June 15, 2018 - link

    Absolutely incorrect. I installed tons of the stock Intel coolers on i5s and i7s and they work as specified for the stock settings of the CPUs plus were normally very quiet.
  • SirMaster - Monday, June 11, 2018 - link

    "K" CPUs con't come with heatsinks or fans... Neither does the 8700K or 8600K or 7700K, etc.
  • Matthmaroo - Monday, June 11, 2018 - link

    It’s been a while for you , I see - K series cpus have no cooler
  • Memo.Ray - Monday, June 11, 2018 - link

    Memo.Ray - Monday, June 11, 2018 - link
    As I mentioned in my comment in the other article a couple of days ago:

    Intel managed to give away 8086 "binned" 8700K (AKA 8086K) and still make some money on top of it. win-win situation :D

    https://www.anandtech.com/comments/12940/intels-co...
  • jimmysmitty - Friday, June 15, 2018 - link

    And you miscalculated because you used the i7 8700 cost not the 8700K cost. They made maybe $300K on them.

    You know I have never seen anyone complain about say a 40th anniversary version of a car.
  • just4U - Wednesday, June 13, 2018 - link

    If it were more similar to the 4790K with a better thermal design (think devils canyon..) it's something I'd be interested in over the 8700K. It's not tho… and doesn't even come with a specialty cooler that might peak interest.. but rather "NO COOLER" at all.. I dunno..

    I think Intel missed the boat with this one.
  • MDD1963 - Tuesday, June 26, 2018 - link

    Who *actually* thought, after so many years of Intel not giving coolers with it's "K" model variants, that this one might come with a bundled cooler? :)

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