KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
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.
Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.
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.
