Barbs: Lord of the Rings: Gollum is the worst game of the year

HDR tech first impression: Gollum on PC

ComputerBase is currently working on a tech test for The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, but it wants and must warn directly that the ban will fall and hopefully in time for the many interested parties: the PC version has, in fact, a semi-normal lately, with a huge to deal with with technical problems.

One is the shader compilation stutter (it appears to be that and not the traversal stutter, though analysis continues) which is extreme – not necessarily in frequency, but in the severity of the hacks. It happens again and again on a system with a GeForce RTX 4090 and a Ryzen 9 7950X3D that the picture stops in the middle of shape control and after a short pause of the camera, which rotates 180 degrees, returns the player back to the game, almost disoriented.

The performance itself is also low, and given the quality of the graphics, it is simply bad. Lord of the Rings: Gollum isn’t a pretty game, but even a GeForce RTX 4090 can’t sustain 60fps in Ultra HD with maximum graphics – with DLSS quality, mind you, and therefore WQHD display resolution! It is noticeable that the frame rate varies greatly. In one scene, our test system barely achieved more than 50fps, just a few feet short of 150fps.

Ray tracing is slow and unconvincing

In the raw version available to the editors, ray tracing isn’t convincing either. Ray tracing is used in the game for reflections and some shadows, but you hardly notice it.

The reflections are limited to the water, which definitely looks better when it can be seen in the game. Shadows are more common in the image and look better, but the improvement over point shadows is barely noticeable. Effects cost a lot of performance.

In a scene the Editors ran into, the GeForce RTX 4090 with RT delivered just 55fps instead of 99fps—that’s 44 percent lower than the fps rate for effect that can’t be seen in the scene. The game only offers to turn RT on or off, which is not allowed anymore nowadays. RT effects should not only be modifiable separately from each other, but also offer different quality levels. LotR: Gollum does not offer that.

There is another problem with downsampling. The game offers Nvidia DLSS 2 and DLSS 3 as well as AMD FSR 2. Ultra DLSS resolution usually makes a good impression and can, should and should be used in Ultra HD. Only some objects that use Bloom can glow like crazy with DLSS, which is annoying then. On the other hand, FSR 2 is disappointing, just something isn’t quite right here. The whole image gets very blurry with FSR 2, which doesn’t happen with native resolution and DLSS. Since there is also no sharpness option (there is one for DLSS), FSR 2 cannot be used currently, which is a big problem for AMD graphics cards.

10 GB is enough – although there is mud

When it comes to graphics memory requirements, Lord of the Rings: Gollum is more conservative. The title didn’t handle more than 9GB in testing even in UHD with DLSS, so there are no longer any problems with a 10GB graphics card at the latest. On the other hand, some textures load with a slight delay, especially in cut scenes – for a brief moment some elements look very muddy.

Controlling Lord of the Rings: Gollum with a mouse and keyboard can currently only be described as imprecise, and a gamepad might help at this point.

Another point of criticism is the sparse sequences in the game, which only runs at 30fps, which is immediately noticeable visually. These are pre-rendered and in low resolution as well, which is annoying because the quality and FPS of these sequences drops sharply.

The editors are currently gathering more impressions of the game and will then provide a detailed tech test of the game over the course of the next week. If no patch appears by then, the result can only be negative. All previously expressed fears were confirmed.