The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition Review: Mid-Range Turing, High-End Price

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 an engine that may not be bleeding edge. Shadow of War also supports HDR (HDR10).

Shadow of War is one of the more favorable games in terms of the 20 series' performance gains over Pascal, and this carries over to the RTX 2070. The resulting situation is rather favorable for the RTX 2070, as it creeps up on or even overtakes the GTX 1080 Ti, while the RTX 2080 Ti and 2080 perform comfortably above. So even when the RX Vega outperforms the GTX 1080, the RTX 2070 is a tier above.

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