Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
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One of the highest-rated games of 2014, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is an excellent open-world adventure and uses the LithTech Jupiter EX to deliver eye-catching visuals. Putting the strain on these mid-to-high-end cards, we test with Ultra quality settings at FHD and QHD, and notch things down to Very High quality for 4K UHD.
Shadow of Mordor is a new addition to our suite and one that eats-up graphics card memory for breakfast. HD textures make this title more reliant on frame buffer than most, and it's a good indication of what happens when games really hammer a GPU's memory subsystem.
This is the GTX 960's Achilles' heel, and in this scenario performance actually drops when compared to the previous-generation GTX 760. At 1080p, GTX 960 is 15 per cent slower than the GTX 760 it replaces, and the Radeons outfitted with 3GB of memory stretch out a comfortable lead.
