Conclusion

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is one of the hottest titles this season. The gameplay is similar to that of its predecessor, with refinements applied everywhere and a more complex story line. Graphics are good, worthy of 2017, with detailed models and textures and amazing combat animations. Rendering looks crisp, unless you chose to render at a lower resolution or with reduced texture settings. Like many other recent releases, Middle-earth: Shadow of War includes dynamic resolution scaling with an actually very clever implementation. Instead of setting a fixed factor, you tell it the framerate you want, and it will dynamically reduce the render resolution to achieve that goal. The optionally downloadable 4K cutscenes are a first for the PC and clearly show that Monolith cares about PC gamers using the latest monitors. With the addition of the HD texture pack, which is an optional download too, you are able to enjoy super-crisp textures, but our testing shows that even without that pack, the textures look really good. Actual differences are barely visible, even less so during hectic gameplay. The optional downloads take up around 35 GB, and if you are on a slower connection, don't worry, you're not losing out on much.

Performance requirements at the highest settings are high. A GTX 1080 Ti can't deliver 60 FPS at 4K, but it's reasonably close. Thanks to plenty of options in the details settings, you can easily adjust the framerates to your PC's capabilities. What I do miss is an option to change field of view.

While the game wants you to think that you need a ton of VRAM, our testing shows that you'll actually be fine with a 3 GB VRAM card. I'm not 100% sure what causes this, but it seems that the game just tries to fill up the VRAM with as many textures as possible, even if these texture will never be used on the current map. Let us know your experiences in the comments section of this review; I wonder if there are cases where there actually is a noticeable FPS hit. One potential use of the high-res texture pack is for screenshots, which are enabled through an in-game screenshot mode that is separate from NVIDIA Ansel, which is also supported. In both modes, you can freely move the camera, pan, and zoom while the game's action is frozen, which is perfect for when it comes to taking that awesome action screenshot.

Surprising performance numbers come from AMD cards, which often beat their NVIDIA counterparts even though this is an NVIDIA sponsored title. The highlight here is certainly Vega 64, which conclusively beats the GTX 1080 - at 4K, it is 10% ahead, and the gap widens to 13% with the game's Ultra textures installed.