Our dear friends over at PCGamesHardware have released a comparison between Middle-earth: Shadow Of Mordor’s Ultra and the High textures. As we can see, the differences are minimal – to say the least – and at this point we have to wonder what exactly is consuming this amount of VRAM, especially when The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter presented higher quality textures with way less VRAM requirements. Stay tuned for our Performance Analysis but until then, enjoy the comparison shots below (High is on the left and Ultra on the right)!
[UPDATE]
PCGamesHardware’s Thilo has informed us about an issue the German website encountered during its tests. Apparently the HD Texture Pack was not available when the team contacted the comparison shots. PCGamesHardware updated its comparison shots, and we’ve included the new ones below. This time around, we can definitely notice a slight difference between Ultra and High textures.
New Comparisons:
Old Comparisons:
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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i believe that ultra texture are meant for people going above 1080p aka 4k, you cant see the differences on 1080p.
But even so, I’m sure if downscaled or using Nvidia’s new downscaling on the 970/980 there will hardly be a difference, certain objects still look very low res even with the High Res Pack.
Dynamic Super Resolution is basically just Anti-aliasing on overdrive. It won’t make textures look sharper, it just fixes jagged edges on older games that don’t support anti-aliasing.
I have a GTX 970 and I tested this out with Skyrim. My TV is 1080p. Tried it at 4k. No difference.
This is just my conclusion. If anybody is trying it out on another game with better results, please let me know. I went from a gtx 660ti to a 970, so it was still worth it for me.
Thanks for that Yitakka, so essentially that feature doesn’t do much for older games, but I heard that games like AC4 at 4K really does work well , I’m sooner or later to get a 970 as well but I think I need a whole new build altogether.
Sorry to say that but you are absolutely wrong. You can easily notice that on both sets of screenshots textures are poor quality. That’s clearly visible on the stone wall not to mention the horrible texture partially cover by the grass. This one looks higher resolution on the “Ultra” example though.
Texture resolution will have impact regardless of the screen resolution. You can’t see the difference only if you are far from the texture. In any game try approaching a wall and analyzing what it looks like on low, medium, high and ultra texture settings.
My statement was Pre Update comparison, which clearly there is no difference, in the update shots there is a difference (i.e the face is better/smoother.rounded etc with ultra textures). as for noticing textures I sit a few inches away from the screen so I always notice the textures.
I haven’t got my copy yet(still waiting to see if I get delivered on release(3rd of October or 8th sadly) but seems that they game allows you to select ultra even without it installed so I dunno.
You can see a difference alright, it’s the screen most people are you using that is the culprit. 50+ inches makes a HUGE difference.
I knew the 6GB Ultra textures were B.S. You only have to look at the game to see the textures in general are nothing special. Modded Skyrim looks way better without the ridiculous VRAM requirements.
How on Earth are they using up all that memory? Spectacularly inefficient compression maybe? No compression at all?
here is done intentionally so that everyone would think that the console is very powerful, especially Microsoft is happy with his very weak console
Considering that they delayed the release of the game on PS3 and X360 (so people will go and buy a new console), it’s obvious that Sony and MS put their paws on this game. They could pay them for this pile of BS as well.
How should I explain it? You know that the world of Skyrim (Oblivion, Fallout, no matter) is divided into cells? Why? Because you can’t load the whole Skyrim into the memory, and pretty much any other open world game. You need load new resources and purge the memory on fly.
Now, it’s obvious that you can easily screw up everything. Make those cells in Skyrim bigger than they should be and the memory consume will be immense. You can also make them bigger to raise the requirements. You get the idea?
Yeah but that’s an old way of rendering and a bad one ,streaming data into the world when it’s needed is just a better way. TES engine won’t load or animate certain objects out of the cells so you get waterfalls that don’t animate and just look like a bad texture. Their engine is so old it doesn’t even use deferred rendering and tries to patch it up with DX9 deferred shadows. The LOD shadow settings are also bad and fixed. It’s also so CPU bound to the point of being silly.
Well, I just wanted to explain the idea behind this ridiculous requirements in the most simplest way. When I said “streaming” in one of the previous threads, some user started to say something about internet speed and connection.
It’s obvious to me that Monolith is either just being lazy or getting paid by MS/Sony/Nvidia. Textures in this game clearly aren’t worth 6Gb VRAM + 8Gb RAM. Even games that were made on old Gamebryo, like Skyrim, are completely playable with 2K textures on a middle-end machine.
From what I’ve seen, the textures are nice on high anyway.
There are different compression formats that compress the textures on the fly via the GPU, most common is DXTC(S3TC) so I don’t see any reason not to use it. S3TC did have quality issues a long time ago but it’s not an issue now.
i would like to see an comparison between medium and high.
That’s why people shouldn’t be marketing victims..I can’t see any difference at all..Just 6GB marketing BS..
It’s not that there are minimal differnces, there are no differences at all. Until you do the tests between the high and ultra textures, I’m inclined to think that this user did not have the ultra texture pack for wathever reason…
Those screenshots came from PCGamesHardware, not from some user.
You are inclined to think correctly. That is exactly what happened.
The difference is really most noticeable when you’re running the game in
a resolution like 3840×2160. It’s not as visible on lower res like
1080p .
It’s not that there are minimal differnces, there are no differences at
all. On their page there is one with a slider that you can see a minimal difference, but the 6gb Vram requirement is B.S.
Perhaps the Ultra textures are uncompressed?
Wolfenstein: The New Order has an option to use uncompressed textures and on my GTX 980 they use around 3.3 GB of VRAM, much more than the 3 GB of my previous GTX 780 hence why the game stuttered badly unless I used the compressed texture option.
and still looks meh.
I have hard time believing that those are ultra textures, if so,where does texture packs 10GB of size go to..
After HD texture packs for Skyrim these textures look pretty sh**ty… I don’t understand why they need 6gb of VRAM
Anyone seeing a difference? I don’t wanna sound like a consolite, but there’s no noticeable difference.
Nope I’m not seeing it
none here too
I did saw…not that great but it is there…
The difference is most noticeable when you’re running the game in a resolution like 3840×2160. It’s not as visible on lower res like 1080p.
The difference is the most noticeable when you’re running the game in a resolution like 3840×2160. It’s not as visible on lower res like 1080p .
john The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter barely use 1100mb Vram and the game look great
It looks GORGEOUS. Far better than most video games.
first time it look very strange i didnt know what to do just look her and there lol
Yea, more of that and less of Call of duty type of corridor crap. 🙂
Yeah, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter looks amazing. Especially considering how well it runs.
What a F**** JOKE!
It looks like complete garbage even on the so called ultra.
6GB and still not even looks good, WTF are those clown be smoking!
I guess I wont even d/l this crap for free and test it out, stay away from this F*ckn turd!!
Will be testing out the new Sherlock game insteed!
“wtf are those clown be smoking!”
English is so dead.
Maybe English isn’t his first language.
Nope it aint, but I agree it was aweful spelling there ..LOL!
GTF Di–S*IIT!
Actually, a LMAO when I saw how bad my spelling was ..LOL!
I hope your “testing” involves buying the game first.
Yeapp matey I do ..Allway pay for Pc games but ALLWAYS pirate console crap 😉
would would someone waste 60$ to test a game? always pirate before you buy. what a scrub.
Why? Because that’s the right thing to do for anyone with half an education, and moreover because no one owes you anything, scrub.
You owe them your money for playing what they have made with their blood and sweat. That you can’t afford it is not their problem, it is yours. That still doesn’t justify you pirating their game.
anyway.. your half-education argument is not valid either since there are so many ways to get the game legitimate thanks to all those cd-key websites. You can get the game for all low as 23€
I think you replied to me by mistake. I was making the “half-education”
comment towards John, who apparently is okay with stealing.
I did and i’m sorry, i tried to remove it but then it became a guest message ._.
Blood and sweat for working on a computer, ok then……… LOL
Well thank you for supporting DRM, Always online etc.. because you are supporting those lovely things right? Oh you’re not, then why are you stealing games, when you don’t own them?
It is the minority that buys a game after they have pirated it, presumably because they complete it and then see no reason in buying it.
Just like console users that trade games and no money goes back to the publishers, but hey that’s moral and the right way, even though it hurts devs the same way as pirating. Console users can also give their games away to friends or share them, yet more money devs and publishers are losing, but it’s moral right?
No that is not the same, you compare trading/selling privately to pirating where there is a difference. lets say that you didn’t pay for the game because you got it from a friend, then lets presume that your friend bought it from the store, that is money going directly towards the devs. Where if he pirated the game, then there would likely only be sale from the one person who was responsible for buying, uploading and sharing the game with crowd of people, which came to the site to pirate it.
The majority of people pirating games, don’t tend to think “This is cool, i’ll buy it”, because why should they when they already have the game on their PC, downloaded and possibly half way through it. Pirating on consoles vs trading is somewhat moral granted, but there is also a lot more work and “sacrifice” in modding your console.
The pirating rate is in a totally different league compared to how many pirate games on PC.
You can’t say what the “majority” of people pirating think or do because nobody knows. 20% of them could buy the game that were never going to buy it in the first place because they played the pirated version.
Pirating and sharing, trading both ‘do’ the same thing but of course they are different in their ways. If you share or trade a game that person won’t buy it, so it’s a loss sale, plus a gained sale from Gamestop who make money of the back of it.
It is true that i can’t say what the majority will do but statistics and actions over the years, has shown that pirating on PC hurts developers and publishers much more than on consoles, especially when we take single player games as an example. I can’t proof anything but that is very likely to be a reason why PC don’t get some console games (other than because they are exclusive), the quality of game ports because of potential less sales and why DRM has gone the way it has. Pirating hurts, trading surely does too, but since Sony have implemented it themselves, there is likely a lesser known explanation to that.
I have to call bull$h!t on this argument. I know far more people downloading games for consoles than PC. I actually know someone who has over 1000 ps3 games (all pirated) and has more steam games than me.
A study was made where they correlated the probable gains from pirated content and the estimated gain that they get from the direct “advertising” of those who pirated their games (I saw that on kotaku, but it wasn’t their original study nor do I have the link, but I assume it to be easy to google….I hope). The conclusion was that, as long as they continue to oppose piracy, they will maintain a positive result from the pirating itself. It is what leads to the permission of youtube walkthroughs and paying streamers to play their games on twitch.
The punchline was that downloads do not represent a lost sale, but they represent critics.
DRM is nothing but a PR stunt, it doesn’t work, it never did.
As for exclusives and specific console content, the answer is simple. Sony and Microsoft make money for each game sold in their console. They don’t make money on games that come out for PC. That is why PC games are cheaper on day 1 and become even cheaper on day 2. With this information, take a wild guess as to why they don’t want games to be played on PCs, as to why they try everything they can to submit developers to their consoles.
It is a much more complex issue than most know it to be (or even care) and it doesn’t have easy answers. Just sit back and enjoy the show.
Congratulations, i bet 80% of those steam games are from $1 bundles. Having a lot of steam games today means nothing as there are so many bundles all the time, and people buy them cheap because they can. also it might be that your friend has over 1000 console games but the fact is that you need to get specific equipment to play pirated games on PS3 and Xbox360, makes the probability of pirating on console vs PC much lower than for example going to some torrent site and download the hottest pc game. likewise your console will practically become useless if you get permanently banned.
PC games aren’t cheaper on day one, indie games maybe but not AAA titles. You can’t go to a retail store or authenticated seller of a PC game on any kind of platform and get it for less than the original price.
First, anyone can check that PC game prices are about 20 bucks cheaper than consoles on release (this specific game, you can now get it for 23$).
Second, the fact that the games obtained for PC are cheap is besides the point, he has them regardless. Cheaper, better, more.
And as for needing specific equipment to play pirated games on PS3, that is wrong. As far as I know, it is a software. Someone offered it to me and maybe I would even feel tempted to accept it if I even played PS3 (bought it for God of War 3 and Metal Gear Solid 4, never used it again).
Just the simple installation of games lead to some gamers avoidance of PC, let alone altering the games to play pirated ones. As for the consoles, they just download the game and they’re done (I’ve seen it).
yeah i didn’t mention that but i assumed we estimated that PC games were ~20 less than console games.
“Cheaper, better, more” what kind of random statement is that… we can also look at it like this “Less money, worse games or no porting, bankruptcy” which one do you prefer?
The only thing you gain from buying bundles like some douce is getting games you don’t even play because you forget you have them. Since when did more = better?
I thought we bought games to play them, not collect them.
Playing burned games on a PS3 or Xbox varies in process, it requires “hacking” tools in most cases, custom firmware and disassembling the console (at least with the xbox 360) the ps3 can be hacked quite easily with usb (if you have the right firmware) and software.
I too own a ps3 and xbox 360 and i only have exclusives for them because that it mostly what i buy consoles for, which i’m fine with.
I should also mention that i have been there too, modifying my xbox 360 and what mostly made me stop doing it, was getting permanently banned on Xbox Live. Had to buy a new Xbox (expensive at the time) and afterwards never touched my consoles with modification tools again. it is not worth doing for the consequences and restrictions.
So much better than the console peasant equivalent on the PoS4.
Sick, evil, lying fanboy shills screaming about peasants. Get mental help. You are sick and evil.
Stop spreading fanboy lies, hatred, and FUD, it accomplishes nothing. It’s not healthy to hate pieces of plastic and people who like playing video games on them. It’s sad that you hate good video games for being on the wrong piece of plastic.
PCs and consoles have different pros and cons depending on THE CONSUMER’s needs. It’s only fanboys that think their opinions are “the truth” and try to prove them as absolutes.
Not everyone has the time, interest, ability, or money to research and buy a bunch of parts, build the PC, install OS/drivers and get everything working, file rebates, or try to get a “discount” version of Windows. Consoles are still a viable financial market for a reason.
I also don’t see it. What is the difference between Low and Ultra then? This looks blurry.
The difference is mind blowing…
Guys, its all to sell video cards, take the “salt with a grain of sales” lol!
that obvious
nvidia need to sell more of TITAN cards
plus they have 6/8gb cards coming later this year.
more? they say they cant keep them in stock.
More money than sense comes to mind.
Even with the High Res The Vanishing of Ethan Carter still better and uses less resources, I just can’t believe it.
Okay, on the update, I see some noticeable differences, but I still think it doesn’t justify the 6GB VRAM requirement
I think it’s better for devs to leave in the uncompressed versions of textures as an optional download though, at least. If nothing else in 2-3 years pretty much every card will have 6GB vRAM, so having highest quality versions available will be pretty good. I don’t personally think it justifies it either, but texture quality does have a very definite ‘wall’ on how much you notice higher resolutions, especially in third person games.
They didn’t put it in the main game to force people to download them, so I think it was a good thing to do. I don’t see why anyone could complain about it though. This isn’t the same as a game not being ‘optimized for PC’, since it’s not like consoles have those 6GB textures. At all. Or even close.
uncompressed textures is funny man, cause there can be no difference between compressed ones when its done right, just more memory usage as someone didn’t care.. high vram req. is only due to devs not using system RAM on PC effectively. New console use one shared memory , PC uses two types of memory and needs to be done separately
Since late 70’s every single texture that is stored in VRAM uses DXT (or BC) compression. So high VRAM usage is not due to lack of it.
S3 demoed S3TC in the 90s using 1024×1024 texture sizes, then Microsoft brought it and called it DXT. In OpenGL it’s called S3TC.
if you check ultra textures in mordor and compare to ultra textures in older games that worked with 1.5gb vRam , you can see that its all big BS and just bad coding for PC memory
there is not 6gb vram rewquirement, its all bullshit and lies. game is very well optimzied too, am playing it with ultra on a 680 2gb and i never dip below 40. i took motion blur off and shadows on high, and gg
no stuttering like watch dogs?
on ultra with motion blur on and ultra shadows, yes, a little stutter here and there, but nowhere near swatch dogs. take off motion blur, nobody needs that sh*t, and lower shadows to high, cause ya, shadows on ultra, we really notice that kind of sh*t. and its ahuge fps boost with no stutter
Take ambient occlusion one step down to High from Ultra and you’ll gain huge fps and won’t lose any detail 😉
Its the draw distance that requires so much video memory as there appears to be no in-game texture downscaling. The game world also has plenty going on nearby you at all times.
LOL @ all the people before the UPDATE saying there was a HUGE difference.
Judging from that test on Neogaf, Ultra uses only 700 Mb more than High (~3600 instead of ~2900), which means that the difference should be minimal, since it’s obvious that not all of the textures were changed. http://www.neogaf. com/forum/showpost.php?p=132208286&postcount=107
Honestly, I hope that modders will unpack that HQ Texture Pack and compare those resources with the original. A little investigation wouldn’t hurt.
And someone here had hopes for 4096 x 4096, lol.
at high it looks medium to low to me, who the **** call it a high quality texture ?
A console gamer?
:)) ture
But but console gamers don’t care about graphics, just how many millions of combos they can get. 😀
They only care about graphics when it’s launch time for new systems.
Haha.
seriosuly this game is not graphically impressive.
wooo… looks like not only ps3 is calling… she wanted the jaggys back… now i bet that N64 is gonna call because of textures…
My eyes! Kill it, kill it with fire!
The screenshots could have been better :
Even now that the newly updated comparison is out, I’m reminded very much of last autumn’s “CoD Ghosts requires 8gb of RAM” fiasco. The graphical results don’t seem to justify the requirements. I’ve approximately maxed my 7970’s 3gb’s of VRAM on ultra high Skyrim texture packs and mods, and ultra textures in Crysis 3, that look much nicer than what I’m seeing in that newest comparison shot.
here is a better comparison -> pic 5 vs 6: http://www.golem . de/news/mittelerde-mordors-schatten-6-gbyte-vram-fuer-scharfe-ultra-texturen-notwendig-1409-109531.html
Hey guys so far this is what I’ve come up with playing at 1080p
Benchmark results:
Average 83.01 fps,82.72 fps, 82.83 fps
Minimum 25.56 fps,24.96 fps, 36.38 fps
GTX 680 2GB SLI, I7 3820 @ 4.25
Afterburner stats:
GPU1 usage 95%
GPU2 usage 95%
VRAM1 2023MB
VRAM2 2023MB
RAM 2458
Everything is on Max except for textures which is on high. Its warns that you need 3GB but my 2GB is fine tight fit but fine. I guess the 2GB+ is for the 1440p/4K crowd.
so you can play high textures on 2gb?
I wonder how evil within will run on you rig
Yeah 2GB seems to be enough at 1080p. Just downloaded and tested the ultra hd. Yep can’t run that but I knew that already. I’m looking forward to Evil Within but I’m pretty sure those guys ain’t messing around. 4GB MINIMUM?
I belive its bs, those requirments are very uninfromative.
You can see a difference alright, it’s the screen most people are you using that is the culprit. 50+ inches makes a HUGE difference
There is a difference. It’s not huge like some games, but a difference. That said, who really cares?
Nothing I read about it really attempted to sell it as an all new graphics benchmark. While some games I buy because they look damn pretty, this one I was bought for the gameplay. I only played about 20 minutes last night before I had to get to bed, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s smooth, fun, and brutal.
I would be laughing my head off if it turned out they took a high textures and upscaled them to “ultra” 🙂
Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a PC game . This is just a straight port . Hence VRAM requirements .
boring…
The Witcher 2’s textures looks better, AC4’s textures look better, Crysis 3 textures look better, Metro Last Light’s textures look better, Sniper Elite 3’s textures look better, Arma 3’s textures look better, all within 2/3GB of VRAM it’s pathetic these games asking for more VRAM don’t look that good compared to the above games’ textures.
its just ps4 version slapped onto PC ,
PC have ddr3 and gddr5 which should be used together , but no , lets load our whole game into VRAM and just don’t give a damn
Well said. These devs need to be more efficient with their assets. They shouldn’t ask for massive VRAM requirements unless there is something to show for it.
sad part is, there is no variety in this game (both gameplay and graphics), it has one small map and one big flat map without anything special going on. at least in watch dogs we had thousands of buildings, tons of cars with different materials/textures etc… and real variety in game’s world, not a flat grass land with only orcs on it
Yeah, watching TB’s video now and it looks repetitive. You know what? Risen 3 is destroying a lot of these AAA games on world design.
i heard good things about Risen 3, but never played any of them, after Gothic 4 i never played any of their games but perhaps in steam sells or something i might get all 3 of them. to me Lego Marvels was a repetitive game but at least it has some variety in it’s world :))
The world design is stunning, if you can get past some of the things that it’s been rated down to death for then it’s awesome, the magic combat is fun too but PB games are like they are, not to please everyone for the sake of sales. It’s more about exploring and finding things that rewarding. Risen 3 does have a similar mechanic like the xray vision but you need crystals to see different things, which you need to hunt for anyway.
on the new pics is noticeable better tesselation effects on both ultra pics. i highly doubt it is just a texture resolution bump
No difference, LOL
ps3 called. she wants the jaggys back!!! 🙂
NO AA OPTION=NO BUY
LMFAO.
Up voted for the pic but you gotta be a m**on not to buy this amazing game! GOTY contender for sure……
Up voted for the pic but you gotta be a dumb a** not to buy this amazing game! GOTY contender for sure……
Are you referring to PC not having AA options? It does.
It only has the extremely taxing Supersampling AA. When you set your resolution ingame, it let’s you choose 150% and 200% of your native resolution.
For those who don’t know. If your resolution is 1920×1080 (100%) then when you choose 200%, the game will now render at 3840×2160 which your GPU will then scale down to your monitor resolution.
Click on the image to enlarge: http://imgur.com/319FKJL
Well… im a guy who cant stand jaggs… so i use downsample lots of time.i know what it is. But its not a, how can i say it, normal aa method. Its a performance killer in most games.
Its good to have that increse resolution build in the game engine. But you need to have a aa method. 2x 4x 8x… the good and old one. Sometimes a little resolution increse and 2x aa looks awesome. And the performance impact is not heavy at all
Yeah I would have preferred some good old MSAA or CSAA.
The explanation was just for other people reading who may not know 🙂
High looks like low and Ultra looks like medium to high.
Should use 1-3gb
whatever, i have been playing this on high for the last 8 hours and it’s f’ing awesome, i love the brutality of the combat and the nemesis system, it’s great
This game has all of the markers of a typical multiplatform game built for last-gen consoles, and ported to PC….just like WB’s Batman games. No texture pack is going to change that. Claiming you need a 6GB card for the Ultra version of this unoptimized crap….especially when compared to Skyrim w/mods or even RYSE:SoR…. is a huge slap in the face to PC gamers.
6GB Vram for this? Textures A JOKE!
Wow, looks like they replaced 512 textures with 1024
And his coat got a new alpha map, phew fantastic
motion blur is the first thing i disable. It is amazingly stupid to make the world blur when i move my mouse and look around, incredibly stupid
Lol ok the HD textures .. you will see a difference at 1080P. This “Dynamic Super Resolution is basically just Anti-aliasing on overdrive” <— the reason or excuses some use so they wont have to upgrade. Man you have the internet and google .. pffft…haha loved this one..
I really feel for console gamers. PC paid less then $49 (25% off Green). You paid $59 for less graphics and.. you say nothing yet you keep PAYING more. Say something..
This 6 vram..please so far all maxed 2560 970 avg 59fps. HD text all there.
Shadow of Mordor PC ultra texture are better than high and PS4 but not by much(youtube capture).
http://i.imgur.com/RJrDtYs.jpg