What to Expect, Wrap Up

Not everyone will hold but I call up Rising of the Tomb Raider looks fifty-fifty ameliorate than other visually stunning games, including biggy The Witcher 3.

In the past few days nosotros've seen forums filling upwards with comments about how unoptimized the game is and this merely isn't true. In that location might still be room for further optimization, but it's an fantabulous port on the whole. Rise of the Tomb Raider is a lot like the original Crysis in that it's a bit ahead of its time, which is a skillful thing.

If more games were like this the PC gaming globe would be more on the cut edge and enthusiasts who take heavily invested in loftier-end multi-GPU setups would exist able to savor an experience worthy of that investment more often.

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a lot like the original Crysis in that it'southward a bit alee of its fourth dimension, which is a good matter.

The graphics are so heed-blowing that I've most played the game twice. The first fourth dimension I was so taken in past the incredible graphics that I often lost focus of the storyline and objective. There isn't a world of difference between the Medium, High and Very High presets (for a detailed side-by-side comparison, get hither). Having spent quite a bit of time playing around with the diverse graphics settings it became clear that the large killer for performance was Nvidia's HBAO+. This ambience apoplexy method reduced functioning of Radeon GPUs by 15% or more while Nvidia'due south GPUs took a much smaller striking.

Turning off Pure Hair allowed for an boosted half dozen - 8% performance on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs so the affect of this pilus technology isn't meaning in Rise of the Tomb Raider and certainly nada like Nvidia's HairWorks in The Witcher 3.

Gamers using AMD hardware, namely electric current-gen flagships such every bit the Fury and Nano serial, we recommend fugitive the Very High quality preset for now equally performance gets a bit messy due to brutal frame drops. These same settings don't hammer the 390X and 390 nearly as much and they are able to deliver quite squeamish functioning at 1080p. The outcome has to be VRAM-related merely for whatsoever reason Nvidia'due south ain GTX 970 doesn't suffer the same performance issues, though it'due south a practiced bit slower than the 390 here.

This game gobbles retentivity -- both VRAM and organization RAM. In our test information technology would classify up to 7GB of VRAM when using the R9 390 or 390X. With the 390 or 390X installed the game would swallow 4.2GB of organisation memory and that jumps to 7.1GB with the Nano or Fury. It'due south worth mentioning that for these benchmarks our test organization was only configured with 8GB of DDR4 retentiveness rather than the usual 16GB. Non realizing this could exist an consequence and it's something I will look into shortly using the Fury 10 and Nano.

When running at 1440p on 'Loftier', nosotros didn't suffer any frame rate stuttering with the Nano or Fury Ten similar we did at 1080p using the 'Very Loftier' preset. In fact, AMD's flagship GPUs performed well and provided noticeably amend performance than the 390X and GTX 980. This is curt of maxim, a driver update for Radeon cards should address some of these issues.

Gamers looking to take reward of their shiny new 4K panels volition want at least $1,300 worth of GPUs in their rig as nosotros found dual Fury Xs or 980 Tis to be a must here.

On the CPU performance front we found some interesting results, almost notably of which were found when comparison the Core i7-6700K and 4770K. The 6700K was quite a bit faster and still when downclocked to 2.5GHz performance wasn't degraded. As usual, gamers running a Cadre i5 or Core i7 processor released in the final four years shouldn't accept any worries with this title.

Heavily clocked AMD FX processors will too get by without much trouble. We were surprised past how well the Cadre i3 processors performed, in particular the i3-6100 which matched the FX-8350. Despite their dual-core designs, the Pentium G3258 and G4400 as well managed to deliver more consistent performance than the Athlon X4 860K.

Playing on the Core i7-6700K showed a CPU load of around 20-xxx% and this shot upward to effectually 60-80% on the FX-9590.

Overall, Rise of the Tomb Raider looks amazing and I b eastward lieve the gorgeous visuals warrant its steep demand for graphics hardware.