Daedalic Entertainment released last week The Lord of the Rings: Gollum on PC. Powered by Unreal Engine 4 and using DLSS 2/3 and Ray Tracing, it’s time to benchmark these features first and share our results.
For these benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, AMD’s RX 7900XTX, NVIDIA’s RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080 and RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 532.03 and the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 23.5.1 drivers. Moreover, we’ve disabled SMT and the second CCD on our 7950X3D.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum uses Ray Tracing to enhance the game’s reflections and shadows. And, to be honest, these effects are underwhelming in this title. The game would greatly benefit from RTGI which would significantly improve its visuals. Instead, Daedalic has used RT for a relatively minimal visual improvement. Furthermore, the game will be constantly switching between SSR and RT Reflections as the draw distance for RT Reflections is very limited.
Daedalic Entertainment has also provided a universal On/Off setting for Ray Tracing. Thus, you can’t select between RT Reflections or RT Shadows, and you cannot adjust their quality. Instead, you can only enable or disable them.
At Native 1080p/Epic Settings/Ray Tracing, the only GPU that can run the game with over 60fps is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090. At Native 1440p/Epic/Ray Tracing, the RTX 4090 can drop below 60fps (so you’ll need a G-Sync monitor to properly enjoy it). Lastly, regarding 4K, the RTX2080Ti and RTX3080 ran out of VRAM at that resolution and that’s why they performed so horribly.
Now the good news is that The Lord of the Rings: Gollum takes advantage of DLSS 2 and DLSS 3. With DLSS 2 Quality, the RTX 4090 can push over 60fps even at 4K/Epic/RT. Similarly, the RTX 3080 can provide a smooth experience at both 1080p and 1440p. Unfortunately for AMD users, though, the game does not support AMD FSR 2.0. The good news is that Daedalic plans to add support for it via a post-launch update.
DLSS 3 also brings a significant performance boost to this game. As we can see, DLSS 3 Frame Generation can improve minimum framerates by 45% and average framerates by 41%. As such, owners of the RTX 4090 can run this game fully maxed out at 4K with over 110fps at 4K/DLSS 3 Quality Mode.
To be honest, though, I don’t see anything here that justifies these performance figures. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is an ugly game, and all characters look mediocre. This is a big letdown, and it’s nowhere close to what cross-gen games should look like. Yes, Daedalic is a small team. However, this game should be running WAY, WAY BETTER for the graphics it displays on screen. Yes, the game can run really smoothly with DLSS 2 and DLSS 3, but developers should not be solely relying on these techniques.
Stay tuned for our “rasterized” PC Performance Analysis, in which we’ll be testing more AMD GPUs!
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.”
Contact: Email
This game is just pitiful.
Another stuttering engine 4 game
will be honest. characters could look much better, but environments are fine and at points quite good looking like normal ue4 stuff. even best looking ue4 games has same quirks. actual game tho isnt that great.
John could you please consider rerunning benchmarks on games after they are fully patched. Unfortunatelly we live in an age where the release version is not always how the game will perform if someone buys it >3 months from release
With the game dropping below 300 players on the first day, what (financial) incentive is there for the devs to ever continue their work on this?
I fear “release first and patch later” is already a way outdated concept.
Yes, I don’t care about this game. It was a general suggestion. For example the other day I tried the Dead Space expecting to obliterate my PC due to the initial reviews, but it run pretty OK. If there wasn’t a demo for me to try out, I would never though of buying it due to the initial performance reviews
I know performance would be so bad but I think 10series are still relevant
It would be a nice addition to test on a gtx1080 so I (1070 owner) have a reference or idea what performance to expect
Gollum isn’t breath taking at all still seems I would struggle at 1080p low which scares me from future games
ps: I’m a big fan of this site regularly checking it since 2014 or 2015 and yet that’s my first comment :))
the gap between 30series and 10series is insane. Yet we see 30series struggling?? how did this happen
Video game developers are relying on DLSS and FSR rather than doing the various things (often collectively called “optimization”) necessary to make their games run at reasonable FPS.
That being said, it’s doubtful that this is the fault of the developers themselves, and it is probably a management decision to get the games out the door faster. It may even be forced on them by publishers.
You mean the 2.5yo 30series?
on this scale next gen will live 1 year then struggle lol. this isn’t phones
You mean the 2.5yo 30series?
yeah the roughly 2yo cards shall still be top notch
4060 released few days ago. Don’t make it sound like 2years is a long time in VGA cards industry. rigs used to age 5-6 years no problem
Due to stagnation. Now we have RT and AI driving forward.
I agree, the GTX 10 series is still very much relevant. From the Steam hardware survey we can see that the GTX 1060 and GTX 1650 are two of the most common GPU’s, so it would be nice if at least one of these two could be included.
Granted it seems that only raytracing was benchmarked here, so they would actually need to have benchmarked non-raytraced performance to be able to include any of the GTX cards in the benchmarks.
https://media4.giphy.com/media/MmFVEhDzF0UUw/giphy-downsized-small.mp4
Stop making articles about this trash game as if it’s relevant in any way.
Gotta tell you just how good fake frames are.