Rise of the Tomb Raider Benchmarked, Performance Review

[Steve]

Rise of the Tomb Raider has been widely praised for its gameplay and visuals and now that the PC version is out, we are taking it for a spin. Rise of the Tomb Raider is arguably the best looking game to hit the PC yet, and without question the cut-scenes are the best I have seen. Now it's benchmark time.

Nvidia had a hand in the game's adaption to PC, though that might not be the best way to word it. Yes, Tomb Raider is now a GameWorks title and in spite of featuring Pure Hair which has its roots deeply embedded in AMD's TressFX, we can assume Nvidia has made every effort to optimize this and other visual features for its own hardware.

Read the complete article.

 

[Mike Gray]

What's the Crossfire/SLI situation here? From the looks of it, neither option was available to whoever ran the benchmarks.

 

[Steve]

What's the Crossfire/SLI situation here? From the looks of it, neither option was available to whoever ran the benchmarks.

SLI works, Crossfire doesn't.

 

[Adhmuz]

"Finally let's look at how the fan favorite dual-core Pentium G3258 Anniversary Edition processor scales."

Thank you for that, much appreciated, I have mine OC'ed at 4.4GHz which seems to be right in the sweet spot, truly an amazing little sub $100 CPU.

The only thing I would be interested in seeing is how well the first gen i7s can handle the game, with and without OC. I'll have to get a copy of the game and test that myself.

Great series of benchmarks, multi GPU results are the only thing really missing, but as stated, Crossfire is not yet supported.

 

[RoosterFish2]

I really like the pictures with the slider, good addition.

 

[SuperVeloce]

"On the CPU performance front we found some interesting results, most notably of which were found when comparing the Core i7-6700K and 4770K".
I am almost certain it has something to do with a brand new intel (ddr4) memory controller and possibly ram speeds. It would seem so after watching some of the benchmarks over the internet.

Also I think 8GB of system ram is not enough if gpu framebuffer gets overloaded (as the game allocates/gobbles ram like crazy) and that will fill up system ram and it start swapping things to SSD/HDD. I've seen that under testing with 8/16gb combinations, 16GB helps with stuttering and drops.

 

[Puiu]

The very high settings on 1080p seem to be a combination of driver and game engine problems that need to be resolved for AMD. let's see how well the driver updates fixes that.
That being said, I was extremely surprised by the how well the Nano performed on high resolutions.

 

[hahahanoobs]

Thank you again for including the 2500K in your Performance Reviews!

 

[DKRON]

So SLI GTX970 @3440x1440 would work well?

 

[lripplinger]

Looks like the game destroyed my GTX 660Ti...LOL

 

[Raoul Duke]

Game looks great (no pun intended) except to play at more than 1080p I'll need a better video card. A single GTX 980 Ti sells for (on average) $1,000 here.

 

[darkzelda]

Love this reviews, I'd like to see some results for the Core i7 4790K.

 

[Steve]

Love this reviews, I'd like to see some results for the Core i7 4790K.

Look to the 4770K, its the same processor just clocked a bit slower. The 4790K will be somewhere between the 4770K and 6700K.

 

[amstech]

They did an excellent job with her hiney.

 

[robb213]

So SLI GTX970 @3440x1440 would work well?

If you don't mind playing on average around 30 frames a sec, I assume they can. I hear SLI scailing is rather poor as well.

 

[SuperVeloce]

Looks like the game destroyed my GTX 660Ti...LOL

And to think I almost bought this card and still decided for cheaper 7870xt, as it was still a better buy at the time of buying. Later everyone pushed the mighty 660ti for better price/performance, despite price being as high or higher than 7950 at my country. Interesting stuff, this.

 

[SuperVeloce]

Love this reviews, I'd like to see some results for the Core i7 4790K.

As we can see, the frequency scaling with intel i7 is basically non-existent. Platform/arhitecture change is the only thing that helps.

 

[wiak]

AMD Tomb Raider Driver is out, time for a update?...

 

[howzz1854]

I thought I'd chime in that my dual R290x Crossfire is getting around 77~100% scaling. which is surprisingly well for its initial release. Crimson 16.1.1 driver. currently running on 3440x1440 res with every setting on VERY HIGH, but texture setting on HIGH only. I notice the VRAM buffer stutter with texture setting to VERY HIGH. in-doors, I average anywhere between high 50fps to 75fps. outdoors with busy scene anywhere between mid 40s to mid 50s.

CPU is a i7 3770K at 4.8ghz with 16GB of DDR3 1866 RAM
hope this helps.

 

[DAOWAce]

980 Ti can't even keep 60FPS at 1440p?

We need Pascal, now.

And DX12 apparently.

 

[DKRON]

If you don't mind playing on average around 30 frames a sec, I assume they can. I hear SLI scailing is rather poor as well.

Well lets hope they fix scaling, im used to waiting quite awhile to play new games anyway

 

[Andy Molnar]

So SLI GTX970 @3440x1440 would work well?

If you don't mind playing on average around 30 frames a sec, I assume they can. I hear SLI scailing is rather poor as well.

I have an Aorus x7 Pro with 970m SLI. The game runs solid 60 fps avg I've not seen it go lower than 54 fps min. This is with HBAO+, MSAA, Very High for everything, and PureHair maxed. 1080p. So yes, SLI scales well with a 970, even on laptop SLI.

 

[Andy Molnar]

If you don't mind playing on average around 30 frames a sec, I assume they can. I hear SLI scailing is rather poor as well.

Well lets hope they fix scaling, im used to waiting quite awhile to play new games anyway

Scaling works very well on this game with 970s in SLI. I have the lower performing 970m in SLI in my laptop, and the game is hovering at 59-60 fps avg with 54-55 min. See the setting I use in my response to Robb213's comment. I was also considering 970s for a desktop build, they are great cards.

 

[DKRON]

Scaling works very well on this game with 970s in SLI. I have the lower performing 970m in SLI in my laptop, and the game is hovering at 59-60 fps avg with 54-55 min. See the setting I use in my response to Robb213's comment. I was also considering 970s for a desktop build, they are great cards.

Thank you! Also they are great cards for a desktop build, maxed out everything so far @3440x1440, struggles slightly with hairworks turned on though in the whitcher 3 and with shadows in fallout 4 (though I think they fixed that because it seems a lot more stable now)

 

[Andy Molnar]

Scaling works very well on this game with 970s in SLI. I have the lower performing 970m in SLI in my laptop, and the game is hovering at 59-60 fps avg with 54-55 min. See the setting I use in my response to Robb213's comment. I was also considering 970s for a desktop build, they are great cards.

Thank you! Also they are great cards for a desktop build, maxed out everything so far @3440x1440, struggles slightly with hairworks turned on though in the whitcher 3 and with shadows in fallout 4 (though I think they fixed that because it seems a lot more stable now)

The biggest thing holding me back is that its a laptop, and has the problem of thermal throttling. The CPU is an i7-4870HQ and clocks at about 3.6 Ghz, I think the CPU is the bigger thing holding back performance. 2 970's is more than enough, especially if they have more than 3GB VRAM. I agree with the comment about Direct X 12 and Pascal. If there was an update for the game that allowed DX12, the VRAM would double in SLI and give you 6GB if you had 3 per card, or 8 if you had 4 per card. DX12 is the cheapest way for us all to get some extra frames. And when pascal comes out... chips designed specifically for 4K gamers in mind.

Desktop 970s in SLI are amazing if they can pull off those fps numbers at 4K, I didnt read that you were playing at 4K resolutions. That's incredible.

Update: I benchmarked in Soviet Installation to judge the impact on a high-end gaming laptop using SLI

Test System Specs:

Aorus X7 Pro 3rd Gen (before G-sync) with some upgrades

Intel i7-4870HQ ~3.5-3.7Ghz
SLI 970m 3GB GDDR5
Raid0 mSATA SSDs / 1TB Samsung Evo SSD
32 GB DDR3 1866mhz RAM
Repaste CPU & GPUs with Arctic Silver 5

1080p
HIGH Tex quality
VERY HIGH everything else
x16 AF
MSAA
Avg. 60fps
Min-43 fps

4K/3840x2160
LOW/MEDIUMTex Quality
Antialiasing OFF/ Anisotropic Filter TRILINEAR (not needed at these resolutions)
Low/Medium most settings
PureHair Very High (cause why would you want to play without it?)
Avg 30 fps
Min 20 fps

I consider 4k unplayable on a laptop, since I wager 980m SLI to net you maybe 10-20 fps extra?
1080p at the above settings looks incredibly good. I'll wait for Pascal to build another Desktop.
I am still trying to decide which cards will nail a game like this at 60fps Min and maxed out at 4K.