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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  • bug77 - Monday, June 11, 2018 - link

    So what happened here? It looks like Intel's play with frequencies made this throttle more often. At least that the only explanation I can find for 8700k ending up better in so many tests.
  • Tkan215215 - Monday, June 11, 2018 - link

    As always its called milking and wallet ripper they know people still Buy them anyway
  • bug77 - Monday, June 11, 2018 - link

    I wasn't expecting this to be a cost-effective part, but rather a collector-oriented one.
    But mostly worse than a standard part is surely unexpected.
  • AutomaticTaco - Monday, June 11, 2018 - link

    I don't think it's worse as much as the silicon lottery exists regardless of it. In other words, even among speed binned parts some OC better than others. And that's true for both the 8086K, the 8700K or any others.
  • just4U - Wednesday, June 13, 2018 - link

    I agree bug,

    I'd be very interested in this processor if it brought something to the table to justify it's cost. The 4790K did with a better thermal design. They could have added a kick ass cooler, or a factory delid and redo for better thermals. Something .. anything besides a small bump in clocks.
  • Drumsticks - Monday, June 11, 2018 - link

    It might be milking, but I kind of have a hard time believing that. They're only making 50,000 of them, and only at about a 21% markup over the 8700k. But they're flat out giving away 16% of the chips. I doubt Intel is going to milk much money beyond their regular business from this. It's the companies 50th anniversary year, so I'm going to guess it's just positive fanfare and a collector's item related to that and it happening to be an anniversary for a well known processor at the same time.
  • Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer - Monday, June 11, 2018 - link

    I enjoy hating Intel as much as the next guy but this is a good point.

    Revenue from 41,914 8086Ks: $17,813,450
    Revenue from 50,000 8700Ks: $17,500,000 (at $350 apiece)

    The remaining $313,450 doesn't really feel like a lot of money when you factor in binning the chips and dealing with all the other overhead of the promotion, especially since Intel isn't getting all of that money anyway.
  • SanX - Monday, June 11, 2018 - link

    This was actually not the revenue but the PROFIT you blind people with easily effed brains. The production cost for this chip was probably less then 20 bucks. The processor in your phone is probably more hi-tech, has more transistors, more cores, and was made on more advances factories with 10nm litho being all sold below $25.
  • mkaibear - Tuesday, June 12, 2018 - link

    What are you smoking?

    His maths is bang on, although he neglects the cut the retailer will be taking off the top for that. They aren't making that much profit off each chip.
  • SanX - Tuesday, June 12, 2018 - link

    They aren't making that much profit off each chip? If they aren't making huge profits then all mobile chip factories lose money by selling the same transistor count processors like the one in Apple or Samsung phones for just $25

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