Today's Hard|Forum Post
Today's Hard|Forum Post
Date:
Monday , February 15, 2016
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Rise of the Tomb Raider Video Card Performance Review

A new Tomb Raider game is out, Rise of the Tomb Raider. We take RoTR and find out how it performs and compares on no less than 14 of today's latest video card offerings from the AMD and NVIDIA GPU lineups from top-to-bottom using the latest drivers and game patch v1.0 build 610.1_64.

Introduction

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a new action-adventure game, released on January 28th for the PC. This game was developed by Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix. Rise of the Tomb Raider is the successor to Tomb Raider released in 2013.

A little history lesson, we utilized Tomb Raider quite a bit when it was released and used it in our evaluation gaming suite for a very long time thereafter. Here is our full performance and IQ article on that game. Tomb Raider introduced AMD's TressFX hair effects for Lara's hair which at the time was pretty incredible in image quality. It did need a lot of GPU performance, but looked much better than standard hair for the time. Tomb Raider also pushed image quality forward and utilized forward thinking DX11 graphics like tessellation, high definition ambient occlusion, depth of Field, high resolution textures, and even Super Sampling AA.

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Rise of the Tomb Raider is based on a new gamine engine built in-house by Crystal Dynamics called the Foundation Engine. Some of the new features include physically based rendering, HDR, adaptive tone-mapping, global illumination, deferred lighting, volumetric lighting and a brand new in-house hair simulation system. This time, instead of going with AMD for TressFX, or NVIDIA with Hair Works, Crystal Dynamics devised its own hair simulation it is called PureHair. Also in use is NVIDIA's HBAO+, and of course tessellation.

PureHair

Let's talk a little bit about PureHair. In the last Tomb Raider game Crystal Dynamics leveraged AMD's TressFX, which did look great. It moved realistically, and made hair finally look "real" in a game. At its onset it did cost a heavy bit of performance, and initially was slower on NVIDIA GPUs. Later, with driver updates, performance evened out with this affect and with newer GPUs it became a non-issue and the performance drain was a lot lower.

In Rise of the Tomb Raider Crystal Dynamics went down its own path this time and created PureHair. PureHair can add 30,000 strands of hair to a character model, in this case Lara. The individual hairs can react to physics in the game and based on the materials they are moving through like air or water. There are three options, you can turn it off, turn it on, or turn it on "very high" quality setting. With the "on" option this is the recommended setting for most players, and those needing more performance. This is a lower quality version. The "very high" option is the one that can in some cases up-close create 30,000 strands of hair and naturally is the most performance demanding.

New Patch v1.0 build 610.1_64

Note that on February 5th a new patch for this game was released which incorporates new graphics features and image quality improvements. We are using this patch in our testing today. Therefore, all performance today is under the brand new v1.0 build 610.1_64 February 5th patch.

• New graphics option 'Specular Reflection Quality' to enhance resolution and reduce aliasing of specular reflections, at some performance cost.

• New graphics option to disable film-grain independently from 'Screen Effects'.

• Improved HBAO+ quality, including better occlusion for distant objects.

• Improved NVIDIA SLI performance. (Steam only)

A new patch was released Friday, that did impact performance and this will be covered on the conclusion page.