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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  • Vayra - Friday, September 21, 2018 - link

    Why would I want a feature like DLSS when current AA methods do the job fine and we can also just run at native, higher resolution anyway and not use any AA whatsoever?

    And why would anyone care about vaporware like RTRT?
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, September 22, 2018 - link

    No DLSS, NO.

    Blur.

    Not capable of raytracing, just raytrace small parts of a frame on selected scenes on selected games...
  • Gastec - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link

    You must be joking right? What do we care if the price of manufacturing increased for Nvidia. We are mot supporters, we are clients. We don't have to support their pricing because WE ARE NOT SOCIOS! Let Nvidia reduce their costs by cutting the salaries of their CEOs and other wortless corporate officers. Then I will BUY their 2080Ti product, at the consumer-friendly price of €750
  • Andrew LB - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    Except for the fact that the non founders edition is $999, not $1200. And the GTX 1080ti released at $699 but for the better part of the past two years cost substantially more.
  • eva02langley - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    Then find one at that price, genius.

    3rd parties are OC their cards and offering additional cooling solutions, they will all be over the MSRP and close to the FE.

    Also, they use GDDR6... you didn't learn anything from Vega and HBM2?
  • jeffcd57 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    Agree the cost is ridiculous. I haven't paid it and won't. Got to many children to raise. I've never seen them at the above mentioned.
  • jeffcd57 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    1080 Ti for $600, where, when?
  • ezridah - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    A month ago.

    https://www.theverge.com/good-deals/2018/8/21/1776...
  • TheJian - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    So buy a 1080ti. For some the new features are worthy and boost perf quite massively making it truly worth it if those technologies are the new way forward. At worst, a good 25 games are already coming with NV's new tech. Many are huge titles most would like to play surely.

    Also as Hexus noted a while back, the price to make these things is just below MSRP. Note the small chip is as large as a titan, and the larger chips...WOW. That's a lot of transistors for a game card. Also apples vs. oranges here, as said by others 1080 etc can't do raytracing or dlss.

    https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-rtx-plat...
    27 games coming with NV tech. Will they look the same on 1080ti or less? NOPE. Will they be faster and BETTER looking on RTX...YEP. Value is in the eye of the beholder ;)
  • Spunjji - Friday, September 21, 2018 - link

    The problem is, you just counted twice when you said "will they be faster and better looking on RTX".

    The absolute truth of it from what little we can glean so far (after the official launch!!!) is that you can have RTX effects /OR/ you can have your better performance, not both. That's a heavy caveat!

    It would be one thing if it were a proposition of waiting a couple of months for some amazing features that will knock your socks off and have few drawbacks. It's another to be paying over the odds for a card now to maybe get some cool stuff that will DEFINITELY run slower and at a lower res than you're used to.

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