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Shadow of Mordor Nvidia Benchmarks On Linux

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We decided it was time to plug Shadow of Mordor again, only this time myself and Samsai have conducted some benchmarks across four different Nvidia GPU’s.

We do all this simply because we love what we do, and thanks to the support from our fans. No need to tip us.

One thing I discovered recently, is that a driver update forced “Sync to VBlank” on in the Nvidia control panel. I suggest you take a look as well, as others I have spoken to also had their setting turned on.

This is easily the most graphically heavy game that Linux has right now, and not because of optimizations being needed, but the graphical options are plentiful and it looks gorgeous. Well, as gorgeous as Mordor looks anyway for a rather bleak setting full of Uruk.

We both have low and higher end cards, with myself having a higher end CPU and Samsai having a lower end CPU, so these benchmarks should give a good indicator at the performance you can currently expect on Linux.

These tests are using the presets as they are, so we haven’t tweaked any other settings. All tests are run at 1920x1080 resolution.

It’s worth noting that for Ultra, you really need around 6GB or more VRAM, as it uses a lot. Luckily, the benchmarks don’t use up too much, so three of our cards were able to go through the benchmark on Ultra, but it killed my 560 Ti. Note that the HD Content texture pack was not used for these benchmarks.

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As you can see, a GTX 970 can run the game at a quite consistent framerate with the averages always above the 60 FPS line. The 3.5GB (4GB technically, but the last 500MB is slow) of VRAM is a quite reasonable amount for this benchmark and the performance drop-off is actually fairly small.
Note: This shows my 970 performing better than the 980 Ti and Titan X tested over at Phoronix, so his benchmark is very odd.

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GTX 760 can also handle the game reasonably well up until Very High. The average framerates are a little bit shy from 60 FPS but they stay in the 50-60 FPS range in Medium to Very High. For the game in question this is very much an acceptable framerate. On Ultra the performance drops rapidly and this is most likely due to the VRAM. The 760 comes with 2GB of VRAM which is a lot lower than the game recommends.

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The 560 Ti is technically faster than the 640 mentioned in the system requirements for this game but it’s starting to be outdated at this point. From Low to High the game runs from a little over 40 to little less than 30 FPS. 30 FPS is usually considered the lowest acceptable framerate, though nothing to cheer about. Note that the game crashed on Ultra and the numbers were a little bit twisted there. It’s definitely too much for this card and its 1GB of VRAM.

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The GTX 550 Ti is very close to the 640 in terms of performance and is definitely starting to be in the absolute minimum territory. It can only reach 30 FPS at Low and even at Medium the card is starting to perform poorly. After High this poor old card is not able to maintain a framerate that anyone could consider playable. This doesn’t come as too big of a surprise because the card only has 1GB of VRAM which pretty much seals the fate of this card on anything higher than Medium.

The raw data can be found on the next page if you want to see it in pure numerical form.

We hoped you like these tests, and hopefully we can do more as and when more cards become available to us, and when more games support benchmarking modes.

Samsai has ordered an AMD R7 370 4GB, and I will also be looking to get one soon. That way we can cover more ground for you, and our benchmarks will be more interesting. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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60 comments
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linux_gamer Aug 5, 2015
Quoting: tuubi@OZSeaford: Don't upgrade your drivers. Save the smurfs!
From the comment thread of another article here:
Quoting: edddeduckferal
Quoting: silverphilIs it mandatory to install nvidia-352 or can i get away with nvidia-331 (preferably) or nvidia-346 without issues or performance problems?
I have a GT 650M.

If you don't run at least those drivers everyone will look like smurfs (all blue), stability should be ok but those drivers are pretty old so your performance stability will vary.

I'd highly recommend using the supported drivers or newer.
I had absolutely no problem running the 346 drivers. No smurfs, no missing textures, at least i did't miss any.
dawidd6 Aug 5, 2015
Is someone running this game on AMD FX 6100 or 6300?
raonlinux Aug 5, 2015
Well i did my bench yesterday with my phenom II 955 thanks to feral and their support I can played it. with low settings at 1080p with the last driver of nvidia I got avg: 50.92 max: 113.11 min 18.90.
ricki42 Aug 5, 2015
Just did some benchmarks with my GTX 980ti
i7-4790k @4.6 GHz
16 GB RAM
EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti ACX SC+ ACX 2.0+ (driver 352.30)
all at 1080p

setting - min - max - ave
low - 63.11 - 205.82 - 114.77
medium - 53.83 - 195.97 - 104.97
high - 52.60 - 184.64 - 99.28
very high - 50.88 - 168.80 - 93.48
ultra - 49.78 - 175.64 - 88.73

Just noticed that the max fps dipped at very high settings. I might redo that one later, don't have time to do more right now.
On the whole, the frame rate fluctuation is quite big.

Edit: reran 'very high' twice and got
49.07 - 176.85 - 94.74
53.49 - 172.49 - 95.32
so the min and max fps can differ quite a bit without changing anything else.


Last edited by ricki42 on 5 August 2015 at 11:26 pm UTC
wvstolzing Aug 5, 2015
Do the 355.06 Beta drivers make any difference? (Just curious.)


Last edited by wvstolzing on 5 August 2015 at 10:07 pm UTC
Elvanex Aug 5, 2015
Quoting: dawidd6Is someone running this game on AMD FX 6100 or 6300?

I am using a fx6300 with a GTX 970 and 16GB of ram. I'm unable to run a benchmark right now, due to my being at work, but I will run one when I get home. The game has been very playable though even on very high settings.
Mountain Man Aug 5, 2015
Quoting: BeamboomTo raise the tests even one more level on the interest-bar (imho) you could add benchmark results for Windows running on the same machine.
Everything I've heard from various forum posts is that the Windows version performs better across the board, which is typical for any game ported from DirectX to OpenGL.
ricki42 Aug 6, 2015
Quoting: wvstolzingDo the 355.06 Beta drivers make any difference? (Just curious.)

Just installed it. I took each benchmark twice and averaged the results to reduce the fluctuations - on low, the first time the minimum fps was 41.19, the second time it was 64.3. I don't know if my system (or steam) is doing something weird in the background.
Anyway, these are the averaged numbers:

setting - min - max - ave
low - 53 - 205 - 117
medium - 54 - 193 - 107
high - 55 - 186 - 106
very high - 52 - 174 - 98
ultra - 51 - 165 - 92

I can only really compare the 'very high' settings to the benchmarks I did for 352.30 since I ran that one 3 times, I don't think a single measurement is reliable enough to compare.
The averages for 352.30 on very high are
very high - 51 - 173 - 95
The difference going to 355.06 is then min/ max/ave = +1 / +1 / +3
Maybe I should turn on some overclock and see if I can get the game to stay consistently above 60 fps...
FutureSuture Aug 6, 2015
These benchmarks are very much appreciated, liamdawe and Samsai! Please continue to provide more. In addition, have you thought about going back and testing older but still graphically intensive releases? Metro 2033 Redux and Metro: Last Light Redux, for instance?
Quoting: liamdaweSamsai has ordered an AMD R7 370 4GB, and I will also be looking to get one soon. That way we can cover more ground for you, and our benchmarks will be more interesting.
This has me quite excited as that means that Samsai and liamdawe can test the open source driver versus the closed source driver as well! I can't wait!
Beamboom Aug 6, 2015
Quoting: Mountain Man
Quoting: BeamboomTo raise the tests even one more level on the interest-bar (imho) you could add benchmark results for Windows running on the same machine.
Everything I've heard from various forum posts is that the Windows version performs better across the board, which is typical for any game ported from DirectX to OpenGL.

Yeah I fully expect the benchmarks to go in Windows' favour nowadays. But it would be interesting to see by how much, and how the gap (eventually) starts to shrink, and at what point in time games start to be of equal or better performance. Cause I think it will happen, it would just be fun to see the graphs over time.
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