 It's the first day of quarter four 2014 so with there are actually new games Season officially upon us it's time for our first game performance video since we did watch dogs way back in May of this year Welcome to our guide to the best graphics cards for Middle Earth shadow of Mordor on PC Corsair gaming RGB keyboards feature precision Cherry MX RGB keyswitches for 16.8 million color per key backlighting for virtually unlimited customization. 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 and bolts 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 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's 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 check out the link in the description for a shirt anyway without further ado here's my co-survivor Luke to tell you about Shadow of Mordor performance things shadows of Mordor is a third-person hack and slash open world 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 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 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 notice very little tearing without G-Sync or V-Sync 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 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 Like 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 fact 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 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 A little bit sassy but okay So we do actually really need to kill the archers or else during this benchmark will get wrecked So you're gonna want to take a 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 other 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 gonna 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 Around so wow okay There we go all right, so what we're gonna 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 gonna have a problem with because you want to kind of bring it down to Three or four or five around there orcs you don't want a whole bunch around you is 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 Batman like with the blocks 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'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 gonna kind of sit here and block and wait for reinforcements to show up Now 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 from the entire benchmark there. We go is a fourth guy Because 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 a 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 But I do have this benchmark within 0.01 FPS 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 gonna not want to die I 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 two 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 the 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 Alright guys, thanks for watching. Don't forget to check the link in the description down below for the shirt Linus is wearing Which I will hopefully be getting later Also, let me know what you think about the new testing methodology for games in the comments down below while you're down there like dislike favorite Subscribe, I think subscribe is wider either way share maybe if you want to comment on the video you can comment here or on the Forum if you like commenting on the forum But you don't like the ads you can become a contributor and while you're there if you click the like help Linus media group button thing In the kind of mid right-hand side you can change all of your Amazon links bookmarks to to our affiliate code to help us out In the future. Thanks again for watching. I'll see you guys next time