Shadow of the Tomb Raider DXR Performance Analysis

Overview

In my opinion, this update feels like it came far too late. I personally haven’t played the game much at all, as I waited for the DXR update to land. Then I waited some more, I waited, I waited still… Then out of the blue, the update hit up this week! RTX games are thin on the ground, so as much as it should have been with us sooner, I’m relieved to see things moving on. I’m sure other gamers are plenty frustrated after the wait too.

RT On

Of course, it’s here now, and for ray tracing enthusiasts like myself, it was (eventually) worth the wait. The game looks fantastic with Ray Tracing turned off. Hell, the game looks amazing with the medium graphics profile enabled! Ramping up to high and ultra, plus adding Ray Tracing gives it that truly next-gen edge that the developers should be proud of. Of course, I bet they are.

Performance

DXR is still new ground for developers, and there’s evidence that they haven’t gotten the hang of it yet. Battlefield V launched with terrible performance, but updates from Nvidia and the developers saw FPS climb steadily with each release since. The same happened with Metro. Furthermore, DLSS quality has been improving.

Out of the DXR games on the market, Tomb Raider seems to be fairing the best. However, I fully expect we’ll see huge FPS gains within weeks as we have done before. I’m still not sold on DLSS, but again, it’s early days and I think the tech has a strong future for gamers.

GPUs

All our cards are some of the best in their respective classes. However, This wasn’t a competition, as we knew the 2080 Ti was faster than a 2080, which is faster than the 2070, and so on. However, for 1080p gaming, the RTX 2060 and 2070 are great. Furthermore, 1440p did well on anything from the RTX 2070. However, for RT On and 4K gaming, you’ll want to dig deep for the RTX 2080 Ti or get used to poor frame rates.