It's the first day of quarter 4 2014. So, with there are actually new games
season officially upon us, it's time for our first game performance video since
we did Watchd Dogs way back in May of this year. Welcome to our guide to the
best graphics cards for Middleear Shadow of Mordor on PC.
Corsair gaming RGB keyboards feature precision Cherry MX RGB key switches for
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Click now to learn more. There are a couple of things we're changing this
time around. First up, we're going to continue to run overclocked graphics
cards for our nuts andbolts video card overviews since those are more geared
towards tweakers anyway. But we're going to start starting today running all
cards at stock for our game specific showdowns. Since most gamers shopping
for a new graphics card to play a specific game probably won't be
overclocking anyway. Second, with 4K
becoming more affordable all the time, we're going to be adding 4K to our
standard 1080p testing. This will be particularly relevant for gamers who are
picking up a 4K monitor or are about to soon, but also for gamers who are
running brand new high-end graphics cards like the GTX 970 or 980 from
NVIDIA who want to leverage dynamic super resolution. NVIDIA's new feature
that essentially is super sample anti-aliasing, but is a little bit
easier to use. Speaking of the 970 and the 980, that leads me to this sweet
shirt I'm wearing. You guys should check out the link in the video description if you want uh zombie Linus and Luke shirt
if you were there for the mod 24 PC
modding live stream event that we hosted. It was pretty cool. It was
pretty fun. If you made it through it the way that we did, even though we
looked like this by the end of it, then uh check out the link in the description
for a shirt. Anyway, without further ado, here's my co-surviver Luke to tell
you about Shadow of Mordor performance
things. Shadows of Mordor is a thirdp person hacken/openworld game which is
getting rave reviews which makes sense when it's being compared to giants like
Batman and Assassin's Creed. It seems very well optimized for PC and even has
an integrated benchmark for us PC folks. But as usual, we'll be doing our own
benchmark. Anyways, so stay tuned to the end of the video if you want to see how
your graphics card stacks up against the currently available options. We're using
our usual graphics card test bench to demonstrate the differences between
graphics cards by removing bottlenecks elsewhere in the system. So, keep that
in mind when looking at the charts. We'll start with 1080p performance. This
game is very well optimized and ran like a dream on every card we tested it at
very high presets with medium textures and no motion blur. In fact, two of our
cards, the GTX 970 and 980, even bumped
up against the 100 FPS limit on their maximums. Uh, that unfortunately is
built into this game. So, when looking at these numbers, keep in mind that the
average frame rates could have been a little higher for both of these cards.
At 4K, the observation that we made about how amazingly well optimized the
game is continues. Even though frame rates were much lower, partially because
we increased the resolution and partially because we cranked the game settings even higher, the game just
feels smooth, especially when compared to other games. Even we're not running
at 60 FPS and even as low as 30 to 40 FPS. And on top of that, we notice we
noticed very little tearing without G-Sync or VSYNC or any kind of frame
rate limiting technology. So now we'll show you guys how we got our numbers so
you can replicate it on your own. I'd like to do a quick tour of the in-game
settings before we start, though, because they're straight
badass. Every in-game visual setting has its own little explanation of what it
does and how it impacts performance. Even giving suggestions in some cases
for how to get the most out of your game with your system. I think my favorite example of
this is the way that they suggest different levels of texture quality depending on the amount of RAM your
graphics card has, and then go as far as to not expect you to know how much you
have. They put a handy little indicator in the corner. One reason they might
have done this is that performance really tanks in a way we have rarely
seen if you configure texture quality too high for your video frame buffer.
Our save point is at a respawn point, which I believe all save points are at.
I would try to be more specific about where exactly this is, but I would
probably have some spoilers. It is pretty close to the beginning of the game, so it's not all that hard to get
to. We were thinking about doing the benchmark in the open world, but the
open world is very randomized, which is, I'm sure, great for gameplay, but not
great for benchmarking. Also, weather effects heavily in impact game
performance. So, we decided to do the benchmark within this kind of instanced
mission that we're running to right now, which you can kind of see on screen. Uh,
because the weather is constant inside the mission, and there's no random
spawning, or at least there's not a ton of random spawning within the mission.
So, it's called the Slaver. We'll just accept and start the mission here.
I see more than any mortal. Little bit sassy, but okay.
So, we do actually really need to kill the archers or else during this benchmark, we'll get wrecked. So, you're
going to want to take out uh there there's usually a guy that spawns there.
There's often at least one guy that spawns on the far side. And one trick is
to climb up here before anyone really notices you and take out the o archer
across over here. And then you don't have to waste one of your fairly
valuable arrows.
Take him out and then you can just kind of drop on everyone from this little
rope bridge thing.
What we're going to want to do now is They didn't notice me.
Okay. They still didn't notice me. Okay. Well,
orcs aren't necessarily the smartest people um around. So, wow.
Okay. Here we go. All right. So, what we're going to want to do is thin the
herd a little bit. So, start this off by just kind of going on a little bit of a
rampage, which I don't think anyone's really going to have a problem with
because you want to kind of bring it down to three or four or five around
their orcs. You don't want a whole bunch around you as that'll be slightly
abnormally taxing on your graphics card. And if you just have a somewhat fixed
number, then it'll be fine. The combat in this game is very
Batmanlike with the blocks. Um, so just be ready to be blocking a
fair amount, but there is no real timer or wait time on your block at all. So it
it's actually not that hard.
All right, so now we're down to these two dudes. They'll get some reinforcements. So I'm just going to
kind of sit here and block and wait for reinforcements to show
up. Now that this guy's here, it's it's probably go time. So, what I do is kind
of stand on the right side of this pole and just block while looking off into
the distance for the entire benchmark. There we go. There's a fourth guy.
Um, cuz it's pretty consistent. I just sit here blocking, looking in the same
spot. It simulates about the same amount of demand as a normal fight would if I
was running around stabbing things, but then it's not as randomized as having
the screen spinning all over the place, which would make it not very easy to
replicate. That being said, the frame rate in this
game is extremely consistent. So, even if I did kind of swing the screen
around, it probably wouldn't make a ton of a difference. Um, but I do have this
benchmark within 0.01 FPS uh every run.
So, I do want to keep it as consistent as possible, but it is a really cool
thing that this game is able to keep really consistent frame rates pretty
much no matter what you're doing and having only really things like amount of
characters on screen and weather affected
heavily. You're going to not want to die. I that that was essentially a death
save that I had to go through right there. You don't want to have to do that
because that can actually affect your frame rate. So yeah, you have to be able
to survive for 2 minutes. The blocking is really not that difficult though, so
you should be fine. Another thing you don't want to do
is that. So you don't want to hold right click, you just want to tap it. If you
hold right click, you'll go into your kind of wraith mode and that will
definitely affect frame rate as well.
And other than that, the rest of the benchmark is pretty much just standing on the right side of this pole with the
prisoner on it, trying to defend yourself by blocking.
Don't worry about saving the prisoner, though.
I don't even think you can. All right, guys. Thanks for watching. Don't forget
to check the link in the description down below for the shirt Lionus was wearing, which I will hopefully be
getting later. Also, uh let me know what you think about the new testing
methodology for games in the comments down below. While you're down there,
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for watching. I'll see you guys next time.