The AMD Radeon R9 380X Review, Feat. ASUS STRIX

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Our next benchmark is Monolith’s popular open-world action game, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. One of our current-gen console multiplatform titles, Shadow of Mordor is plenty punishing on its own, and at Ultra settings it absolutely devours VRAM, showcasing the knock-on effect that current-gen consoles have on VRAM requirements.

Shadow of Mordor is the first game in our benchmark suite that really hammers memory capacity, which in turn drives a very large wedge between the 4GB R9 380X and the 2GB R9 380 and GTX 960. There’s simply no comparison here; even at 1080p the R9 380X is 50% or more ahead. And situations like this are a big reason that I believe that anything other than a budget card should come with 4GB at this time. Even if one is not buying an R9 380X, they should at least be buying a 4GB R9 380 or GTX 960.

Meanwhile it’s interesting to note that this is the only game that shows a real advantage for the R9 380X over the 7970. It’s possible that we’re looking at the differences in 3GB of memory versus 4GB, but given the results at 1440p versus 1080p, I suspect there’s a bit more going on here. Either way it shows that there will be times where a full Tonga card is a distinct improvement over a full Tahiti card.

Our minimum framerates reiterate what we saw in our averages. Even at 1080p the smaller 2GB cards get hit hard.