Shadow of Mordor

The next title in our testing is a battle of system performance with the open world action-adventure title, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (SoM for short). Produced by Monolith and using the LithTech Jupiter EX engine and numerous detail add-ons, SoM goes for detail and complexity. The main story itself was written by the same writer as Red Dead Redemption, and it received Zero Punctuation’s Game of The Year in 2014.

A 2014 game is fairly old to be testing now, however SoM has a stable code and player base, and can still stress a PC down to the ones and zeroes. At the time, SoM was unique, offering a dynamic screen resolution setting allowing users to render at high resolutions that are then scaled down to the monitor. This form of natural oversampling was designed to let the user experience a truer vision of what the developers wanted, assuming you had the graphics hardware to power it but had a sub-4K monitor.

The title has an in-game benchmark, for which we run with an automated script implement the graphics settings, select the benchmark, and parse the frame-time output which is dumped on the drive. The graphics settings include standard options such as Graphical Quality, Lighting, Mesh, Motion Blur, Shadow Quality, Textures, Vegetation Range, Depth of Field, Transparency and Tessellation. There are standard presets as well.

We run the benchmark at 1080p and a native 4K, using our 4K monitors, at the Ultra preset. Results are averaged across four runs and we report the average frame rate, 99th percentile frame rate, and time under analysis. 

For all our results, we show the average frame rate at 1080p first. Mouse over the other graphs underneath to see 99th percentile frame rates and 'Time Under' graphs, as well as results for other resolutions. All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance


1080p

4K

ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6GB Performance


1080p

4K

Sapphire R9 Fury 4GB Performance


1080p

4K

Sapphire RX 480 8GB Performance


1080p

4K

Gaming Performance: Ashes of the Singularity Escalation (1080p, 4K) Gaming Performance: Rise of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 4K)
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  • HollyDOL - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    Ian hasn't failed us. Thorough review on day one. Now to read it whole :-)
  • Ian Cutress - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    Results are still coming in for the 1300X, this will take another day or two and I'll add in the graphs but all the Ryzen 3 1200 data is in Bench.

    Each of the 3 GPUs still to go is about 5 hrs each to test, Chrome Compile and SYSMark is another 10 hr. I've still got results for the 7300 coming in as well on my second test-bed.
  • srkelley5 - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    Thank you! I know that it's more work, but is there any chance of getting charts that compare these results against Vishera cpu's?
  • 0ldman79 - Saturday, July 29, 2017 - link

    Seconded.

    It is a shame that we still don't have a direct comparison between AMD's big CPU from last gen vs the current generation.
  • StevoLincolnite - Saturday, July 29, 2017 - link

    Can't compare my Sandy-Bridge-E 3930K either.
    Or the Phenom 2 x6...
  • 0ldman79 - Wednesday, August 2, 2017 - link

    It looks like a lot of the information is already on the bench, just formatted differently.

    Shame.
  • Ian Cutress - Sunday, July 30, 2017 - link

    I've got a regression testing project ongoing which is taking most of my regular time to get sorted. More details soon.
  • AndrewJacksonZA - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    Thanks for your hard work, Ian (and team?) We appreciate it. I must say, I'm impressed with what this 1300X can do - and for only $130 too!

    Correction on the last graph: the X-axis title says, well, "Title." :-)
  • ddriver - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    You should do relative x scale for the price/performance charts. It will be more informative than absolute scale, besides, how many CPUs under 50$ are there, and how many go as low as 0$?
  • coolhardware - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    Agreed, thank you for the review Ian! I've been waiting for a nice Ryzen close to the $100 price point, the 1300X is close enough in price for me and I like what I read in the review.

    Especially interested to see how performance in my daily work compares to my trusty 2500K and some more modern i7 mobile CPUs.

    Excited to pick one of these up! :-)

    NewEgg shows 7/31 release:
    https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N...

    Amazon usually ships faster for me so I plan on ordering from them:
    http://amzn.to/2v1fJqh (url shortened)

    PS Does MicroCenter usually have CPUs in store on launch day?

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