Using MSI Afterburner OSD or an equivalent program you can see the VRAM, system memory as well as pagefile resources. VRAM bottleneck is seen when system RAM usage as well as the pagefile start spiking when at or near the graphic card’s VRAM limitation. Your frame rate might be fine and above 30 FPS but you feel a slight “pause” or “cut” in the general flow in gameplay. High frametimes or “stuttering” as most describe it, usually occur when it takes to long to go from one frame to another causing a slight delay in the game.
For those that don’t already know frametime is a factor we like analysing due to frame rates not describing the smoothness of the game on various setups. We couldn’t be subjective enough without adding frametimes. Even during tests with Crossfire we see a peak of VRAM load double what the normal values would be, a big error on the Monolith development side. Strangely on our AMD CFX system total VRAM is doubled even though it is well known that when running multi GPU setups the effective memory is only possible to be mirrored, each GPU using its video memory independently . On the advance video menu in the bottom right corner you can see your total video ram. The max frame rate during gameplay is fixed at 100 so if you use something like Fraps UI in-game and have a fairly good system you should easily be able to see this.
To be able to run Ultra you will need to download the 3.7GB Ultra HD pack. The standard game pre-sets are Lowest, Low, Medium, High ,Very High and Ultra. For the SLI970 setup we used alternate frame rendering 2 as we couldn’t get it working with the SLi bits. We set Framepacing to off and CrossfireX to AFR friendly.įor Nvidia SLI 680 we added a profile using the Nvidia Inspector Tool for the game with Sli bits compatibility from Fear 3. Nvidia Sli and AMD Crossfire are not officially supported (as of yet) so we created some workarounds to get them running.įor AMD CrossfireX we created a custom profile for the game in CCC.
We did a standard 60 second benchmark run, starting from jumping from the tower at Udun Foothills (where we span after death or continue a saved game) kill the Orcs and Uruks that are under the tower and run through the Black Road towards the ruins. The scene is also very small and not respresentative of the resource usage during gameplay. Counting frame rates on a black screen in excess of 500 FPS on some occasions causes “fake” averages a lot higher than what we see during gameplay. The game comes with an internal benchmark and it’s forgiving to say the least. Throughout each resolution and setting we fresh boot the system.
We use DDU to clear any previous drivers when interchanging GPUs.
We ran the benchmarks on a fresh install of Windows 8.1 with the latest drivers for our test system. We want to see what’s really going on with this modified console port and what we could get out of our single and Sli/CFX cards.ĢX Galax GTX970 EXOC 4GB, 2X MSI R9-290 Gaming 4S, 2X Asus GTX680 2GB Reference We decided to analyze the performance and gameplay with frame rates, frametimes and VRAM usage as well as an image comparison of the different pre-sets. You guessed it, benchmark time it is then.
If we need that much memory for 1080p what would we need for anything higher or additional Anti-Aliasing ? This seems somewhat farfetched for today’s standards on 1080p, especially with 1440p and 4K monitors being a turning stone to affordable higher resolution gaming. Other than a select few graphics cards (very pricey ones or custom models) there aren’t a lot of GPUs even on the higher end tier from AMD and NVidia that offer 6GB of video ram. We instantly thought that we might just have the next Crysis … or a very poorly optimised console port. For that same reason it’s built up quite the hype when leaked images of the texture detail settings page started rolling out, stating the maximum settings would need 6GB VRAM or more for optimal gameplay on 1080p. Usually with “next-gen” open world video games our PC systems get taxed pretty heavily, especially our graphic cards. An Assassin’s Creed stealth and Batman Arkham fight hybrid as many have stated. Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is a AAA title developed by Monolith Productions and released by WB Interactive.