Gaming: Shadow of War

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.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

AnandTech IGP Low Medium High
Average FPS

Gaming: Final Fantasy XV Gaming: Strange Brigade (DX12, Vulkan)
Comments Locked

206 Comments

View All Comments

  • Slash3 - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link

    Intel is subsidizing retailer discounts in an effort to smooth over the transition to the newer Cascade Lake-X chips. It's part of their $3B marketing and incentive campaign. Subsequent fulfillment from Intel is at the reduced (but unofficial) lower pricing.

    https://www.computerbase.de/2019-10/high-end-cpu-i...

    Intel gets to clear remaining stock and retailers avoid taking a bath on previously purchased CPUs. Makes sense.
  • Spunjji - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link

    If retailers had to drop prices that much to clear stock and Intel weren't chipping in to compensate, we'd definitely be hearing about it.
  • Phynaz - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link

    Intel will be price protecting them.
  • Ratman6161 - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link

    Personal opinion from someone who is NOT in the HEDT market: People whose work/Livelihood comes from tasks that are noticeably better on an HEDT platform, probably don't care about the price or at least don't care as much as the rest of us do. All the math works out differently if you can actually take advantage of the things other than the CPU that HEDT offers. So I think there is still a pretty firm dividing line between x299 and thread ripper on one side and everything else in this test on the other.

    Just saying that price only becomes a deciding factor AFTER you decide which side of that line you are on.
  • AIV - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link

    3950X blurs the line between HEDT and Desktop market. New 16 core EPYC rome (e.g 7302P is less than 1000EUR) along threadripper makes the market segmentation even more blurry. Especially at ~16 cores there are many alternatives in multiple product families.
  • phoenix_rizzen - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link

    Yeah, you can now start mixing and matching CPUs based on your other needs (PCIe lanes, I/O support, memory channels, memory speeds, graphics, etc).

    Ryzen CPUs give you dual-channel memory and 24 (16+4+4) PCIe lanes.
    Threadripper CPUs give you quad-channel memory and 88 (64+16+8) PCIe lanes.
    EPYC CPUs give you octo-channel memory and 128 PCIe lanes.

    Figure out how much memory and I/O you need, then choose the CPU with the number of cores you want.

    From 2-core Athlons with integrated graphics to 64-core monsters, there's plenty of choices along the way. :)

    8-core Ryzen 7
    8-core EPYC

    12-core Ryzen 9
    12-core EPYC

    16-core Ryzen 9
    16-core Threadripper
    16-core EPYC

    24-core Threadripper
    24-core EPYC

    32-core Threadripper
    32-core EPYC
  • lobz - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link

    It's still a bad deal for that price. That CPU is on a dead platform.
  • Phynaz - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link

    Kinda like Threadripper, eh?
  • yeeeeman - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link

    This CPU basically renders Intel CPU until 1000$ useless. Only 9900KS brings something extra in gaming and general app usage. Threadripper will do the same for higher end 1000$+ market. This is the first time in many many years when AMD is better in pretty much all price categories, period.
  • Total Meltdowner - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link

    Glad I bought AMD Stock 3 years ago. Wish I had invested more... sigh.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now