Middle-earth: Shadow of War runs better on Xbox One X than PS4 Pro according to analysis

Back when it was announced, Middle-earth: Shadow of War was one of the first titles confirmed to receive enhancements on Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox One X. The system may not be out yet, but the developers at Monolith have already detailed what these enhancements entail, including two graphics modes. Now Digital Foundry has made an in-depth analysis comparing Shadow of War running on Xbox One X to its PlayStation 4 Pro counterpart, and the results bode extremely well for Microsoft.

We previously knew that the game would feature a Favor Resolution mode and Favor Quality mode. Resolution will target 4K visuals while Quality would feature draw distances, increased texture detail, improved shadow and lighting quality, increased vegetation, improved ambient occlusion, higher polygon counts, and texture filtering improvements. Many of these are shown off in the video from Digital Foundry below. What’s interesting is how much better it looks on an Xbox One X than PlayStation 4 Pro. The Xbox One X version can see better draw distances, clearer and sharper textures, and runs at a higher dynamic resolution than the Pro; the lowest of which was 3360×1890 compared to the Pro’s lowest pixel count of 1512p. This is a 56% improvement.

Digital Foundry also found that Middle-earth: Shadow of War ran almost flawlessly on Xbox One X, hitting a near constant frame rate of 30 FPS. Stress-testing the game in certain areas brought the frame rate down to the low 20s, but it usually performs outstandingly even during scenes with a lot of action.

It should be noted that the build tested by Digital Foundry was an early Gamescom build, and may not be representative of the final product. Still, the improvements are quite noticeable.