The tail end of this month is pretty hectic with the release of two highly anticipated major titles. Rise of the Tomb Raider finally finds its way on the PC platform and supports a huge array of exclusive features including PureHair, deformable snow, advanced lighting effects, HBAO+ and more! The studio responsible for the PC edition is Nixxes software who created the original PC reboot. As you might expect, they are absolute masters when it comes to PC optimization, and initial reports regarding performance are promising. Another game which is bound to cause a great deal of excitement is The Division. The beta begins on the 29th for PC players, and should test people’s hardware quite well. As always with Ubisoft games, it’s important to analyse the level of optimization as historically, many games perform quite poorly on various configurations.
In preparing for the upcoming releases, NVIDIA has launched the 361.75 Game Ready driver. As you might expect, this includes the driver optimizations just in time for Rise of the Tomb Raider and The Division’s arrival. On another note, the driver contains SLI profiles for Metal Gear Solid V’s multiplayer, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Sebastien Loeb Rally Evo, Tomb Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege and Tom Clancy’s The Division. It’s great to see SLI support for triple-A games on launch, and I’m interested to see how well these engines scale across multiple GPUs. Another interesting addition is the support for Thunderbolt 3 external graphics cards. It’s now possible to purchase a Thunderbolt-powered enclosure and upgrade your graphics hardware for a notebook quite easily.
Rise of the Tomb Raider’s launch is remarkably close and we’re hoping to do some coverage regarding its performance across a number of resolution options. This also applies to The Division which looks pretty impressive and I cannot wait to test it on a 21:9 monitor!
