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.
Here's the first big hurdle. Shadow of Mordor is one of the most memory-intensive games around, and it scoffs at the GTX 960's anemic backend. Remember, also, that pairing two cards in SLI doesn't give you a combined 4GB pool of memory - each GPU is still served by an independent 2GB buffer, and the narrow 128-bit bus remains.
As a result, two GTX 960s are up to 60 per cent slower than a single GTX 980 in the land of Mordor, and the GM206 backend - cache, ROPs and memory controllers - is swamped to such an extent that minimum FPS tanks at all resolutions, resulting in what's best described as a juddery mess.
