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.

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

 

MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance


1080p

4K

CPU Gaming Performance: Ashes of the Singularity Escalation CPU Gaming Performance: Rise of the Tomb Raider
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  • FireSnake - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    Awesome revies! Let's read...
  • prisonerX - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    No need, here is a quick summary: "Intel blind panic."
  • StevoLincolnite - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link

    At-least they have finally soundly beat my 3930K in the mainstream after 6 years.

    Still. No point me upgrading just yet.
  • mapesdhs - Friday, October 6, 2017 - link

    Even then there's an interesting option if you want threaded performance; I just upgraded to a XEON E5-2680 v2 (IB-EP) for 165 UKP. Lower 1T speed for sure, but MT should be the same or better as a 3930K @ 4.8. No oc means more stable, less heat/noise/power, and being IB-based means it ups the slots to PCIe 3.0. Not a relevant choice for gaming, but a possibility for those doing VMs, rendering, etc., and just want to get by for a little while longer.
  • Breit - Friday, October 6, 2017 - link

    OR search for an XEON E5-1680v2... :)
    It's an Ivy Bridge-E 8c/16t chip that will fit in Sandy Bridge-E mainboards (x79) and has an unlocked multiplier opposed to this E5-2680v2. So with this you won't lose your overclocking ability.

    But in the end, I guess that the greatly reduced power draw and the more "modern" platform from an i7-8700K system compared to the x79 platform will give it the edge here.
  • mapesdhs - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link

    Very interesting that the 1680 v2 is unlocked, I didn't know that.

    Alas though, availability of the 1680 v2 is basically zero, whereas the 2680 v2 is very easy to find, and the cost of 1680 v2s which are available (outside the UK) is extremely high (typical BIN of 600 UKP, normal auction start price of 350 UKP, completed listings only shown for BIN items which were purchased for between 500 and 600 UKP). By contrast, I bought several 2680 v2s for 165 UKP each. Testing on a P9X79 WS (all-core turbo of 3.1) gives a very impressive 15.44 for CB 11.5, and 1381 for CB R15 which is faster than a stock 8700K (for reference, the 1680 v2 scores 1230 for CB R15). Note the following page on AT has a very handy summary of all the turbo bin levels:

    https://www.anandtech.com/show/7852/intel-xeon-e52...

    So, I'm very pleased with the 2680 v2 purchase, it's faster than my 3930K @ 4.8, runs with very low temps, much lower power draw, hence less heat, less fan noise and since it's not oc'd it'll be solidly reliable (this particular test system will eventually be in an office in India, so power/heat/reliability is critical). For the target systems in question, it's a great solution. Only thing I noticed so far is it didn't like me trying to set a 2133 RAM speed, but it worked ok at 1866; I can probably tighten the timings instead, currently just at 9/11/10/28/2T (GSkill 32GB kit, 8x4GB).

    The 4930K I have though will go into my gaming system (R4E), since I don't mind the oc'ing fun, higher noise, etc., but it's not a system I'll use for converting video, for that I have a 6850K.

    Ian.
  • MrSpadge - Friday, October 6, 2017 - link

    Full throttle: yes. Panic: no. Blind: no.
  • Zingam - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link

    Can you buy it? No? Paper launch of Unobtanium 8000? -> panic, PR propaganda bullshit and dirty Intel marketing tactics as usual targeted at lamer fanboys.

    This comment is written by an Intel user! ;)
  • prisonerX - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link

    We've got enough dumb Intel apologists here already, thanks.
  • coolhardware - Sunday, October 8, 2017 - link

    The i7-8700 is *finally* going to replace my trusty i5-2500K.

    Ordered my 8700 on Amazon http://amzn.to/2y9IamG ($319) and looking forward to a nice upgrade :-) That is a lot of CPU for the money IMHO.

    Kudos to AMD for bringing competition back to the CPU market!

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