PCI Express Scaling Game Performance Analysis review - Performance - 2-way SLI GPU - Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor

GeForce GTX 980 2-way SLI DX11: Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is an action role-playing video game set in The Lord of the Rings universe, developed by Monolith Productions and released by Warner Bros. The game takes place during the gap between the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings saga. We set image quality to in-game 'Very High'. Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor has a built in benchmark. It is not exactly the most precise tool in the shed, therefore you should always keep a variance of roughly 5% in mind. You can run this benchmark 3 times and all times the results can differ slightly. Also switching in-between quality modes and restarting the game often results in the game forcing old image quality settings again. We'll see how this benchmark is going to develop in the future though.

Above the results at the best image quality settings. Again let me state that we are testing at 2560x1440 (WHQD) with image quality settings set to Very High. With an exception here and there, this is the image that is repetitive, Gen 1.1 becomes a bit of a bottleneck. Coming from 1.1. and going to Gen 2.0 shows a 7% perf improvement. The difference in-between an x16 Gen 2.0 and 3.0 slot is 4%

Frametime Recording

• Grey line - GTX 980 @ x16 Gen 1.1
• Dark green line - GTX 980 @ x16 Gen 2.0
• Light green line - GTX 980 @ x16 Gen 3.0

We again spread our 42 seconds lasting benchmark recording and then overlay latency results from the difference generation PCIE slots (lower latency - better). We can see a hint better as to what you are seeing on screen. The latency differences in-between the PCIE Slot configurations are both measurable and noticeable in-between the slowest and fastest configuration. Again, PCIe gen 1.1 x16 (grey) is slower in latency opposed to the differential inbetween Gen 2.0 and 3.0.