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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  • imaheadcase - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    Because bluray players played movies from the start, delivered what they promised from the start even if cost a lot? Duh.
  • PopinFRESH007 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    They played DVDs from the start. Your statement is false
  • imaheadcase - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    Umm nope its true.
  • Spunjji - Friday, September 21, 2018 - link

    Yeah, there was media available at launch. Also Blu-Ray provided a noticeable jump in both quality AND resolution over DVD. RTX provides maybe the first and definitely not the second.
  • V900 - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    And it’s clear that you didn’t read the article, or skimmed it at best, if you’re claiming that “the two technologies have not even seen the real light of day”.

    The tools are out there, developers are working with them, and not only are there many games on the way that support them, there are games out now that use RTX.

    Let me quote from the review:

    “not only was the feat achieved but implemented, and not with proofs-of-concept but with full-fledged AA and AAA games. Today is a milestone from a purely academic view of computer graphics.”
  • tamalero - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    Development means nothing unless they are released. As plans get cancelled, budgets gets cut and technology is replaced or converted/merged into a different standard.
  • imaheadcase - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    You just proved yourself wrong with own quote. lol
    Guess what? Python language is out there, lets all develop games from it! All the tools are available! Its so easy! /sarcasm
  • Ranger1065 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    V900 shillage stench.
  • PopinFRESH007 - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    Just like those HD-DVD adopters, Laser Disc adopters, BetaMax adopters. V900 is pointing out that early adopters accept a level of risk in adopting new technology to enjoy cutting-edge stuff. This is no different that Bluray or DVDs when they came out. People who buy RTX cards have "WORKING TECH" and will have few options to use it just like the 2nd wave of Bluray players. The first Bluray player actually never had a movie released for it and it cost $3800.

    "The first consumer device arrived in stores on April 10, 2003: the Sony BDZ-S77, a $3,800 (US) BD-RE recorder that was made available only in Japan.[20] But there was no standard for prerecorded video, and no movies were released for this player."

    Even 3 years after that when they actually had a standard studios would produce movies for the players that were out cost over $1000 and there was a whopping 7 titles that were available. Similar to RTX being the fastest cards available for current technology, those Bluray players also played DVDs (gasp).
  • imaheadcase - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    Again, the point is bluray WORKED out of the box even if expensive. This doesn't even have any way to even test the other stuff.. You are literally buying something for a FPS boost over previous gens that is not really a big one at that. It be a different tune if lots of games already had the tech in hand by nvidia, had it in games just not enabled...but its not even available to test is silly.

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