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Not many of you guys will be in a position to own a 4K screen alongside the kind of PC required to play games at such a monstrous resolution. However, its always interesting to see the results anyway. We will be running through the 4K benchmark twice, once with the same settings as the 1080p/1440p run through and then again with some more realistic settings for a single card. We do have a second GPU available for SLI but there is currently no profile for it at this time. We will have to wait for Nvidia to release a driver update.
The graphical settings for this run through are very ambitious considering that there is no SLI support for the game just yet.
Going from 1440p to 4K with the same graphical settings cost us 30 frames per second. Our average was 24 frames per second, ideal for the ‘filmic' look some developers seem to be striving for with the current generation consoles.
24 frames per second isn't exactly playable, so we did some tweaking and found a decent balance between fidelity and frame rate for a single GPU at 4K:
The new settings are much less demanding, mixing in some high, medium and low settings with our Ultra textures.
We managed to achieve a much more playable frame rate with these graphical tweaks, averaging 34 frames per second. It may seem like a big step down in fidelity judging from the options menu but in most cases you'll find that 4K at its lowest settings will look just as good as 1080p with high settings.
We did notice frame drops during 4K testing and gameplay, which is to be expected, current single GPU technology just doesn't have the horsepower.
As far as VRAM usage goes, at 4K we observed the game capping out at 3050MB on the GTX 780, so the game is in-fact making full use of the resources. We don't have a 4GB GPU or 6GB GPU on hand at the moment to compare high resolution results.
Benchmarks don't always tell the whole story though so we played a few hours of the game to check for any flaws. We are happy to report that on our system, we didn't encounter any major bugs, graphical glitches, crashes or performance issues while using the 1440p settings listed on the previous page. From our end, it looks like Monolith Studios has done a great job with the PC version of Shadow of Mordor.
Judging from our testing, its safe to say that you can ignore that 6GB ‘requirement' for Ultra textures at sub 4K resolutions, the game is perfectly playable with a 3GB GPU. On another note, I have to say, so far I'm really enjoying the game and its dynamic enemy system. However, I'm still at the early stages so its too soon for me to say whether its definitely worth buying or not.
This game has been compared to Assassin's Creed a fair amount but having played the game, I'd say it has much more in common with the Batman Arkham games- same stealth system, same combat, similar upgrade path, so if you're don't like those familiar mechanics then maybe this game isn't for you.
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KitGuru Says: So there you have it, Shadow of Mordor is perfectly playable on the PC on launch day. Would you guys like to see more of these ‘port report' style posts following the release of a big game? If you already own Shadow of Mordor, then let us know how you're getting on with the game so far.
If the recommend specs are so widely off, the question that has to be asked is did these guys even run their own benchmark?!
I averaged 73 fps on 1080P with everything maxxed out (motion blur was off as it makes me feel ill), Highest was 265 and lowest was 29. That is with an i53570K(stock) 8Gb 1600 ram and a GTX Titan. I have a sneaky suspicion that nowhere near 6Gb of Vram was used during that benchmark, but hopefully when time permits I will rerun it with afterburner in the background.
I see no difference between the ultra textures and normal, apart from a 30fps drop thanks to Nvidia not releasing a decent SLI profile yet. That being said with everything on ultra apart from the textures, it runs alright on two 760s. I might try the Assassins Creed 3 SLI profile since it’s the same engine, right now my second card is only being used 30%. It sucks so much to get a better score in 3DMark than a Titan by over 10%, then be beat down by VRAM requirements.
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There are no ultra textures for this game unless you download them seperately off steam. Ultra defaults to high. Once you grab that large file and install there are noticeable differences and performance impacts. Also using the fear 3 or batman arkham origins sli profile works just fine for enabling sli on this game.
Already got them but I think they must just effect the Uruks since most of the other textures look the same unless you’re using a magnifying glass or something. Also those SLI profiles kinda work, but seem to fluctuate between 70-90% GPU usage on both.
Monolith said the SLI profile is supposed to be out this week. Hopefully that will provide better GPU utilization. Some people get better utilization so far with Farcry 3 bits, or Fear 3 bits. For my 3 way 780Ti the Arkham Origins profile seems to work best for me. http://steamcommunity.com/app/241930/discussions/0/613937306863973441/#p2
so how come with 980GTX I’m having a hard time at 1440p with Ultra textures with the HD pack? This the biggest load of FUD I’ve ever read. The Ultra texture pack was just an afterthought, albeit great one where they’ve put in the high resolution models / textures from their development machines. Some of which may have in excess of 12gb VRAM. It’s a jitterfest with 4GB and below! Test it properly before you spread misinformation.
well as you can see on my post + links , performance wise there is no real difference with the extra Vram. They do need to create an Sli profile soon though as it seems from things I have seen and read that one card runs the game more consistently with no frame drops.
I think Vram does make a difference, about 20 minutes after starting the game up my frames dropped to 3-5 whilst the cache was being purged, that happened every five minutes or so after on high textures, I think it needs at least 3GBs just as a buffer, since even if it uses say 2.1GBs it’ll still get snagged.
Well it does clearly tell you in the options that you need 6GBs of VRAM for the ultra textures, even if it only peaks at 4GBs you still need more as a buffer.
Wow talk about completely misinterpreting what I was saying.
that sounds feasible, a completely lossless buffer must be the reason for the 4Gb requirement then as I don’t recall getting any frame drops at all. However I have both slept and taken my meds since then so I could be mistaken 😛 guess I’ll have to play some more today – purely for research purposes you understand.
how come i cant pick 1080p as resolution in the settings? (I have a 1080p screen) it says 1440p is 100% and 90% is 2304×1296…(?) 80% 2048×1152 70% 1792×1008.
I checked my nvidia controlpanel to make sure the set resolution was set to render 1080p, wich it was. so whats left for me to do? shouldn’t 100% be 1080p? since…100% of my resolution on my screen is..1080p…(?) i dont know, i might be compleetely off here but…yeah whatever. i just wonder why i cant pick 1080p in the settings? does anyone has answeres to this? i googled it but it just pops up a bunch of sites discussing PS4/Xbone running Mordor at 1080p, wich im not intrested in.
is there any way i can fibble with the game files and type in my own resolution so that it forces it to run at 1080p?
Help plz! D:
I have no idea how the hell they’re coming to that conclusion. VRAM never fills to 100% even if the game requires it. At 1440p with all settings at Ultra, the game uses 5.4GB VRAM. However…as has been reported…currently, “ultra” textures are just “high” textures, as the true Ultra textures come out with an additional download that hasn’t been released yet.
The game will RUN if don’t have enough VRAM. But you’ll notice slowdowns, hiccups, etc etc…
For the record…the requirements for this game aren’t based on the game having good graphics or awesome textures. It’s just poorly ported. It was designed for the consoles, which have a ridiculous amount of shared memory available to them. And they didn’t want to put in the time to port properly to the PC. The game, visually, is actually quite lackluster. Models are low polygon, hair is old gen tech, and textures are really subpar.
What game on the pc looks better? I think it looks great at medium textures,on the amd 290x at 4k. List me a game that looks better and I’ll buy it.
I also get the the jitterfest at 4k on high textures on 290x (clocked at 1120/5700), while medium is smooth as silk. Performance falls off the cliff when the vram runs out. I can max the rest of settings.
A ton of them? Battlefield? Call of Duty? Crysis? Assassin’s Creed? Bio Shock? Metro? Watch Dogs? Tomb Raider? Max Payne? Shadows of Mordor isn’t a graphically impressive game…I’m surprised you think it is.
U just need to go on steam, right click on Shadow of mordor, proprieties launch options and write -width 1920 -height 1080 then go to the game and set 100% and GG