Middle-earth: Shadow of War (DX11)

Next up is Middle-earth: Shadow of War, the sequel to Shadow of Mordor. Developed by Monolith, whose last hit was arguably F.E.A.R., Shadow of Mordor returned them to the spotlight with an innovative NPC rival generation and interaction system called the Nemesis System, along with a storyline based on J.R.R. Tolkien's legendarium, and making it work on a highly modified engine that originally powered F.E.A.R. in 2005.

Using the new LithTech Firebird engine, Shadow of War improves on the detail and complexity, and with free add-on high resolution texture packs, offers itself as a good example of getting the most graphics out of a non state-of-the-art engine. Shadow of War also supports HDR (HDR10).

Shadow of War 1920x1080 2560x1440 3840x2160
Average FPS

Shadow of War is one of the more favorable games in terms of the 20 series' performance gains over Pascal, and overall the RTX 2080 is neatly faster than the 1080 Ti, though with a 12 to 17% edge at 4K, not a huge one. The 2080 Ti is comfortably beyond that, though actually its advantage over the 2080 is on the lower end compared to other games with a roughly 25% uplift at 4K.

Regardless, at 1080p we start to see the flagships reach the CPU bottleneck.

Grand Theft Auto V F1 2018
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  • Hixbot - Friday, September 21, 2018 - link

    I'm not sure how midrange 2070/2060 cards will sell if they're not a significant value in performance/price compared to 1070/1060 cards. If AMD offer no competition, Nvidia should still compete with itself
  • Wwhat - Saturday, September 22, 2018 - link

    It's interesting that every comment I've seen says a similar thing and that nobody thinks of uses outside of gaming.
    I would think that for real raytracers and Adobe's graphics and video software for instance the tensor and RT cores would be very interesting.
    I wonder though if open source software will be able to successfully use that new hardware or that Nvidia is too closed for it to get the advantages you might expect.
    And apart from raytracers and such there is also the software science students use too.
    And with the interest in AI currently by students and developers it might also be an interesting offering.
    Although that again relies on Nvidia playing ball a bit.
  • michaelrw - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    "where paying 43% or 50% more gets you 27-28% more performance"
    1080 Ti can be bought in the $600 range, wheres the 2080 Ti is $1200 .. so I'd say thats more than 43-50% price increase..at a minimum we're talking a 71% increase, at worst 100% (Launch MSRP for 1080 Ti was $699)
  • V900 - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    Which is the wrong way of looking at it.

    NVIDIA didn’t just increase the price for shit and giggles, the Turing GPUs are much more expensive to fab, since you’re talking about almost 20 BILLION transistors squeezed into a few hundred mm2.

    Regardless: Comparing the 2080 with the 1080, and claiming there is a 70% price increase, is a bogus logic in the first place, since the 2080 brings a number of things to the table that the 1080 isn’t even capable of.

    Find me a 1080ti with DLSS and that is also capable of raytracing, and then we can compare prices and figure out if there’s a price increase or not.
  • imaheadcase - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    In brings it to the table..on paper more like it. You literally listed the two things that are not really shown AT ALL.
  • mscsniperx - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    No, actually YOUR logic is bogus. Find me a DLSS or Raytracing game to bench.. You can't. There is a reason for that. Raytracing will require a Massive FPS hit, Nvidia knows this and is delaying you from seeing that as damage control.
  • Yojimbo - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    There are no ray tracing games because the technology is new, not because NVIDIA is "delaying them". As far as DLSS, I think those games will appear faster than ray tracing.
  • Andrew LB - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    Coming soon:

    Darksiders III from Gunfire Games / THQ Nordic
    Deliver Us The Moon: Fortuna from KeokeN Interactive
    Fear The Wolves from Vostok Games / Focus Home Interactive
    Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice from Ninja Theory
    KINETIK from Hero Machine Studios
    Outpost Zero from Symmetric Games / tinyBuild Games
    Overkill's The Walking Dead from Overkill Software / Starbreeze Studios
    SCUM from Gamepires / Devolver Digital
    Stormdivers from Housemarque
    Ark: Survival Evolved from Studio Wildcard
    Atomic Heart from Mundfish
    Dauntless from Phoenix Labs
    Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition from Square Enix
    Fractured Lands from Unbroken Studios
    Hitman 2 from IO Interactive / Warner Bros.
    Islands of Nyne from Define Human Studios
    Justice from NetEase
    JX3 from Kingsoft
    Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries from Piranha Games
    PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds from PUBG Corp.
    Remnant: From The Ashes from Arc Games
    Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass from Croteam / Devolver Digital
    Shadow of the Tomb Raider from Square Enix / Eidos-Montréal / Crystal Dynamics / Nixxes
    The Forge Arena from Freezing Raccoon Studios
    We Happy Few from Compulsion Games / Gearbox

    Funny how the same people who praised AMD for being the first to bring full DX12 support yet only 15 games in the first two years used it, are the same people sh*tting on nVidia for bringing a far more revolutionary technology that's going to be in far more games in a shorter time span.
  • jordanclock - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    Considering AMD was the first to bring support to an API that all GPUs could have support for, DLSS is not a comparison. DLSS is an Nvidia-only feature and Nvidia couldn't manage to have even ONE game on launch day with DLSS.
  • Manch - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    AMD spawned Mantle which then turned into Vulcan. Also pushed MS to dev DX12 as it was in both their interests. These APIs can be used by all.

    DLSS while potentially very cool, is as Jordan said proprietary. Like hair works and other crap ot will get light support but devs when it comes to feature sets will spend most of their effort building to common ground. With consoles being AMD GPU based, guess where that will be.

    If will be interesting how AMD will ultimatley respond. Ie gsync/freesync CUDA/OpenCL, etc.

    As Nvidia has stated, these features are designed to work with how current game engines already function so they dont (the devs) have to reinvent the wheel. Ultimately this meanz the integration wont be very deep at least not for awhile.

    For consumers the end goal is always better graphics at the same price point when new releases happen.

    Not that these are bad cards, just expensove and two very key features are unavailable, and that sucks. Hopefully the situation will change sooner rather than later.

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