Rise of the Tomb Raider Now Supports Async Compute

Rise of the Tomb Raider is one of the most visually impressive games to ever grace the PC platform especially if you select the Very High quality preset. The PC version was created by Nixxes, a legendary studio which worked on a number of superb PC ports including Thief, the original Tomb Raider reboot and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Despite being released some time ago, Nixxes have constantly refined performance and added new features including support for DirectX 12. Their latest patch is a huge improvement and takes advantage of asynchronous compute. Here we can see the patch notes in full:

“We have just released the seventh PC patch for Rise of the Tomb Raider, build 1.0.668.0. This patch adds improvements for DX12 multi-GPU support (this includes NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFireX), as well as a variety of other fixes. For details please see below.

This patch will be applied by Steam automatically when you next start the game. If your game does not update, please restart the Steam client. If you are using the game on the Window Store, the update will be available in the near future, and will be downloaded by the Store automatically. We will update this thread when the Windows Store patch is live.

We recommend using the following drivers, especially for Multi-GPU:
AMD: http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMD-Radeon-Software-Crimson-Edition-16.6.1-Release-Notes.aspx
NVIDIA: http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/104726/en-us

This patch includes the following improvements:

• Adds DirectX12 Multi-GPU support. Many of you have requested this, so DirectX 12 now supports NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFireX configurations.
• The benefits of DirectX 12 are still the same, but now you are less likely to be GPU bottlenecked and can reach higher framerates due to the improved CPU utilization DirectX 12 offers.
• Adds utilization of DirectX 12 Asynchronous Compute, on AMD GCN 1.1 GPUs and NVIDIA Pascal-based GPUs, for improved GPU performance.
• On the latest Windows 10 version, V-sync can now be disabled (Windows Store version), and behavior of disabled V-sync has been improved (Steam version).
• Improvements to stereoscopic 3D rendering, including fixes for NIVIDA Surround and AMD Eyefinity in combination with stereoscopic 3D.
• Improved default settings for certain integrated GPUs.
• Removes the Voidhammer Shotgun for users that do not have Cold Darkness Awakens DLC or have not yet unlocked it by rescuing prisoners in Cold Darkness Awakens.
• A fix for a save issue where some game state could get lost in very rare circumstances.
• This patch force-disables the Steam Overlay when using DirectX 12. This is due to stability issues with the Steam Overlay in combination with DirectX 12.
• A fix for crashes with VXAO enabled on NVIDIA GTX1080 cards.
• A variety of other smaller optimizations, bug-fixes, and tweaks.

While we expect this patch to be an improvement for everyone, if you do have trouble with this patch and prefer to stay on the old version we made a Beta available on Steam, Build 647.2, that can be used to switch back to the previous version.”

From my testing, Rise of the Tomb Raider favours NVIDIA hardware by a large degree and this isn’t surprising because it’s a GameWorks title. Saying that, AMD graphics cards can utilise asynchronous compute rather well and experienced significant gains in Ashes of the Singularity which supports this feature. Hopefully, the game will now run much better on AMD GPUs and I’m pleased to see Nixxes continue with their fantastic support. If only more studios had this level of dedication.