An “X” Rated Rumble.
Shadow or Mordor
To tee us off, what finer way to stimulate the shading savagery of over 7000 streaming multiples than a bevy of buffer butchering brutality in a land where tortuous texture packs cast shadows thrice as terrifying as Tolkien’s towering originals? Can polygons really put paid to prose?!
Mordor - Dual R9 Fury X Vs. Dual Titan X.
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Considering the cacophony of scathing scepticism regarding the Fury’s modest mound of memory, any canny promoter of this compact cruiser-weight would surely deem Shadow of Mordor to be a perilous environment in which to tackle an opponent with triple the depth of recall. They’d be sorely mistaken.
The raging Scarlett one strikes back with an effective 6-3 victory, assuming we consider each score for typical and base frame rates to be worth half a point.
At 1080p, it exhibited lesser troughs and loftier peaks during the medium and high quality runs and was only just out averaged by the Titan at ultra, though its minimum remained notably higher.
1440p was split two to one in the Fury’s favor while at 4k, five out of six comparisons were extremely close. The Fury inched ahead at medium, traded honours with the Titan at high and resumed its narrow lead when moving to ultra but with a wider variation in speed.
Moving on to deleterious doubles, things got even tighter. AMD’s marvel edged the averages all the way up to 4k at ultra but the titan countered convincingly by maintaining a more consistent pace, though this statistical bonus was visually impossible to distinguish and the fluidity offered by both cards was equally entrancing.
In view of this, it is important to remember that the minimum values should not be considered momentous other than when influenced by excessive VRAM consumption that is persistent enough to have a detrimental effect on their respective averages as opposed to the odd isolated stutter during exceptionally intensive activity or sudden changes of scenery such as a cross-fade between two sequences within a benchmark or the transition from a load screen to densely rendered environment.
When a secondary, tertiary or quaternary GPU fails to improve performance, it means one of two things; inadequate or negligible driver support for the software in question, or an overly burdened CPU forcing its visionary generals to form an disorderly queue behind it. Notorious though it was, this menacing land shrouded in sinister shades did not pose nearly a stern enough challenge to merit more than a loan card at 1080p. 1440p shifted the workload a touch, but UHD was essential to justify any strapped undergrad blowing a sizeable hole in their tuition fees.
Here’s how the gains translated into scaling. Predictably, 1080p sees both our pairings idly plodding along with their pipelines half cocked and plenty of time to admire them in the case’s shiny interior. 1440p generates a little more room for manoeuvre but not until switching to 4K do we witness what could be declared toil, texels and tears from such formidable technology. Once again, barely a polygon can separate their respective efficiencies.
Comparative potency was close to a mirror image of 3dMark though on this occasion, the gaps are of a random nature and do not invariably diminish as dimensions increase. El “Furioso” is stronger in solo at all three resolutions, swifter in harmony at HD and QHD, but our tag team of Big Daddy Xs boldly fight back to restore parity at 4k.
Being bereft of the faculty to carry out complex experiments detecting stunted and skipped frames, recording individual frame intervals and analysing the proportions of long and short display times, this somewhat linear statistical paraphrase does not account for the visual imperfections that conspire to tarnish otherwise pleasurable gaming.
Essentially, its a numerical counterpart of the previous chart and was composed by accumulating the average frame rates for the three tests at every resolution from both the single and multi card iterations. A far-cry from forensic, it nevertheless serves as a solid guide of where and by what extent each of our candidates gains the upper hand. I shall leave you to decipher its delights.