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Shadow of Mordor benchmarked on Nvidia GTX 670

• Galea Razvan
• October 3rd, 2014

Game Debate has published a benchmark report of Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor on a decent gaming rig powered by a pretty capable Nvidia GTX 670 graphics card. As outlined in the article, the game shows an insatiable appetite for VRAM memory, and due to its incredibly high graphic requirements, Shadow of Mordor will need a 6GB graphics card to get it running at premium performance. Needless to say, not many graphics cards on the market will be able to get the job done. They got the game running on a 2GB GTX 670, Intel i5-2500K, 8GB RAM rig. Not your most up to date configuration, but still a pretty good setup.

Here is where Shadow of Mordor lived up to its reputation and showed that it is indeed a VRAM eating monster. The game clocked over 30 FPS on Ultra High Settings, but with major memory hiccups and very little gameplay time as the game eventually crashed. The game was tested on each of the six default visual graphics settings, from Lowest through to Low, Medium, High, Very High and Ultra to evaluate the FPS impact of each graphic level setting. The most “resource intensive” setting of Shadow of Mordor is the Texture Quality visual feature which was tested in all its four states: Low, Medium, High and Ultra. In the graph below you will see that texture quality had no impact when set on its lowest graphic setting, showing a high level of 115 FPS, but when switched on to the Ultra setting, the differences were massive. Although the game was able to run at a steady 33 FPS, it could not sustain that level for long due to insufficient resources, causing the system to crash.

The cause of this crash is the graphics card obvious inability to sustain the massive amount of VRAM required by the game. When a certain graphics setting level is not supported by the card, a warning message will appear as shown in the image below. As the GTX 670 GPU has only 2GB of VRAM, the Texture Quality Setting should have been set to Medium. When the game was running on Ultra High settings for all features, the regular system memory started to be eaten up to compensate for the GPU’s insufficient memory. The following message reportedly appeared: “Your computer is low on memory” despite the rig is equipped with 8GB RAM. Afterwards, Shadow of Mordor was fired on auto-detect settings, and seemingly showed stable behavior and not such a notable difference in terms of graphics detail compared to the Ultra Settings setup. Take a look, and tell us what you think: