Middle Earth: Shadow of War PC Performance Review

CPU Benchmarks – Ryzen & Intel – Does your Orc army need more CPU grunt?  

Methodology

Full on CPU performance testing is something that is relatively new in our PC game performance analysis pieces, with Ryzen performance being a new addition to our hardware test suite.  

Here we have tested the game using an Intel i7 6850K Broadwell-E Hex-core and an AMD Ryzen 7 1700X over a variety of core configurations when playing the game at 1080p max settings on a GTX 1080. Both CPUs are run at similar clock speeds. 

We ran our Ryzen 7 1700X with 8/16, 6/12, 4/8 and 4/4 core/thread configurations to closely match results from Ryzen 7, 5 and 3 processors. Note that in all of these tests that 16MB of L3 cache was active and that these are not exact emulations of each Ryzen series CPU at the same clock speeds. Even so, these results represent a reasonable ballpark figure.  

On the Intel side, we tested 6/12, 4/8, 4/4 and 2/4 core configurations to represent Intel’s current generation i3, i5 and i7 CPU core configurations. Both CPUs are clocked at 4.0GHz.  

Middle Earth: Shadow of War

In the previous page we got to see how similarly AMD’s RX 480 and Nvidia’s GTX 1060 6GB performed on their latest drivers and here we can see that the same holds true on the CPU side of the equation. 

The game performance here is so similar throughout our tests it is pretty safe to say that the game is GPU limited, with only out dual-core, quad-thread CPU test showcasing a meaningful decrease in framerate.

In Shadow of War, some of the largest conflicts can be seen with Orcs flying red and blue banners respectively, making it very encouraging to see that this conflict does not spill into the world of PC hardware.