The AMD Radeon VII Review: An Unexpected Shot At The High-End
by Nate Oh on February 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTMiddle-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).
We've updated some of the benchmark automation and data processing steps, so results may vary at the 1080p mark compared to previous data.
For Shadow of War, the Radeon VII positioning is much closer to ideal, splitting the GTX 1080 Ti FE and reference RTX 2080 while offering more than 25% improvement over the RX Vega 64. In that sense, at 4K the matchup with the reference RTX 2080 is a bit of a wash, and the Radeon VII can cement its claim at the RTX 2080/GTX 1080 Ti FE performance tier.
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tipoo - Sunday, February 10, 2019 - link
It's MI50vanilla_gorilla - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
As a linux prosumer user who does light gaming, this card is a slam dunk for me.LogitechFan - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
and a noisy one at thatBaneSilvermoon - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Meh, I went looking for a 16GB card about a week before they announced Radeon VII because gaming was using up all 8gb of VRAM and 14gb of system RAM. This card is a no brainer upgrade from my Vega 64.LogitechFan - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
lemme guess, you're playing sandstorm?Gastec - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
I was beginning to think that the "money" was in crytocurrency mining with video cards but I guess after the €1500+ RTX 2080Ti I should reconsider :)eddman - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Perhaps but Turing is also a new architecture, so it's probable it'd get better with newer drivers too.Maxwell is from 2014 and still performs as it should.
As for GPU-accelerated gameworks, obviously nvidia is optimizing it for their own cards only, but that doesn't mean they actively modify the code to make it perform worse on AMD cards; not to mention it would be illegal. (GPU-only gameworks effects can be disabled in game options if need be)
Many (most?) games just utilize the CPU-only gameworks modules; no performance difference between cards.
ccfly - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
you joking right ?1st game they did just that is crysis (they hide modely under water so ati card will render these too
and be slower
and after that they cheat full time ...
eddman - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
No, I'm not.There was no proof of misconduct in crysis 2's case, just baseless rumors.
For all we know, it was an oversight on crytek's part. Also, DX11 was an optional feature, meaning it wasn't part of game's main code, as I've stated.
eddman - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
... I mean an optional toggle for crysis 2. The game could be run in DX9 mode.