Middle-earth: Shadow of War Graphic Settings Guide and Performance Tips
Shadow of War's System Requirements
The game uses Monolith's own Firebird graphics engine (formerly known as LithTech), and despite having large, detailed environments, the system requirements aren't too demanding. However, for a more optimal experience on PC, the recommended specs provide more than enough juice as you'll see in our results.
Minimum requirements:
- CPU: Intel Core i5-2300 / AMD FX-4350
- GPU: Nvidia GTX 660 / AMD HD 7870
- Memory: 6 GB RAM
- Disk Space: 70 GB
Recommended:
- CPU: Intel Core i7-3770 / AMD FX-8350
- GPU: Nvidia GTX 970 or 1060 / AMD RX 480 or 580
- Memory: 12 GB RAM
For the purposes of tests, a mid-range system was used, that closely represents the recommended specs for the game. Testing PCs included an Intel Core i5-3570K CPU, MSI GTX 970 GPU, and 8GB of RAM.
A Look At the Graphics Options
Let's take a quick look at the options. Testers sticked with 1080p for the resolution, but there are more than enough choices here, even allowing you to try 8K (7680x4320). V-Sync helps prevent screen tearing. Dynamic resolution helps maintain consistent performance by adapting resolution in real time to how demanding the game gets; you can set the floor for how low the resolution goes.
While Shadow Of War has six graphical quality presets, I am going custom here. Lighting, Shadows, Mesh qualities are all set to High. Texture quality is also set to High since Ultra is specifically for the 4K texture pack and requires a video card with at least 8GB of video memory. Tessellation adds more three-dimensional detail to surfaces based on mapping data. Depth of Field is an effect that blurs areas that aren't at the focus of the player, and you should set this to your preference.
The game doesn't specify what type of ambient occlusion techniques it uses outright, but testers found Medium to be a good balance between performance and visual quality with the specs. For anti-aliasing, a TAA (temporal anti-aliasing) was used. It's an increasingly popular technique to get rid of jaggies, since it hits a nice balance of quality and performance. You'll definitely want this on over FXAA (fast approximate anti-aliasing), which tends to look too blurry. Texture filtering should be set to Ultra; this basically means anisotropic filtering is set to 16x.
Shadow of War does a great job of showing you what's going behind these graphics settings. Not only does the game explain what each setting does, but it gives you a breakdown of how the settings affect system memory and VRAM consumption. It even provides you with a neat little benchmark tool to get specific frame-time readings and FPS results through a 60-second fly by of an in-engine sequence.
Running On Recommended Specs
With modest systems close to the recommended specs and aforementioned choices in graphics settings, the benchmark results showed an average of 71 FPS. It hit a minimum of 41 FPS but just for a brief moment it got as high as 96 FPS. For the most part, the live FPS readings were consistently between the mid-60s to mid-70s. This gives you a little wiggle room if you want to bump a few other options up a notch.
Bumping shadows up to Ultra alone brought the average down to 62 FPS, which is still an admirable result. If testers max out all the quality settings (except for textures), the average went down to 51 FPS; it's still playable, but not very smoth. Regardless, if you meet the recommended specs, you should have no issues running Shadow of War at 1080p with plenty of visual bells and whistles.
Verdict
There were slight hitches during normal gameplay, but they were few and far between and inconsequential to the game's action in our experience. Visually, the game looks a little flat overall, but the PC version of Middle-earth: Shadow Of War runs exceptionally well, even on modest hardware.
