980ti Enthusiast 980TI SLI Performance in Rise of Tomb Raider

[AManWithPlan]

Hello LLT Forum,

I have been pretty extensively testing the performance of Rise of Tomb Raider on my personal rig (details in profile) and have been dumbfounded with the performance.

A quick rundown of hardware: 5930K processor OC'd to 4ghz all cores, two EVGA 980 TIs in SLI OC'd to +103mhz, GSync 3440x1440 monitor at 95hz, 2x Samsung 850 Pro in Raid 0, 2.8ghz Quadchannel RAM at C14|1T.

I downloaded the GameReady driver (at the time of writing) 361.75 WHQL, launched the title, and set every setting to its maximum possible slider to assess what frame rate looks like for a baseline and begin to downscale features from there. Much to my surprise, all max settings ran at ~20 fps in the menus of the game. This is all due to SSAAx4 which creates a completely impossible workload of rendering 6880x2880 to then downsample to the monitor's resolution. I was honestly surprised it was able to even render the 20 frames and can't help but wonder what kind of machine this option is even there for. Once I set the AA to a non-intensive FXAA (SMAA was not available at the time of testing), framerate became a stable 70-75 and I decided to start the game to begin checking real-time performance.

There is an extensive FPS cost comparison for every feature of the graphical options available on GeForce.com here GeForce Tomb Raider FPS Cost Comparison.

So here is where things get interesting. The game runs an AVG FPS at a respectable 65, however, it dips in almost all close-up scenarios down to 48 fps due to PureHair which renders 30k strands of physics objects at Very High. When setting this to just "On", the number of strands is significantly cut but gives little to no performance increase unless cinematically close to Lara. The cinematics with multiple characters on screen (in close up) can chug the framerate down all the way to the low 40's, sometimes even less. Gsync does an amazing job keeping up with the immersion, but this shouldn't really be a problem for dual GPUs running at Gen3 16x with a processor that has the lanes to support the bandwidth.

Tessellation is another interesting animal. First of all, you HAVE to have tessellation enabled if you want even a semblance of immersion, flat textures look ancient and unappealing in modern gaming. It is fairly dishonest of GeForce.com to suggest disabling it if you're "in need of extra performance". Tessellated textures are everywhere in this game, including where you cannot see them (which goes to the planned obsolescence arguments made many times against Nvidia). Turning off PureHair and Tessellation runs the game at 95fps at 95%, with some occasional dips to high 80's when many characters are on the screen in an open environment.

When I turn off one of my graphics cards and run the game on a single one, this same setting runs at 80 fps at 95% (with occasional dips to low 70's). Turning on PureHair and Tessellation brings the framerate to 58fps on a single card and dipping to below 30 in some cinematics.

What in the actual hell Nvidia? Don't get me wrong, the game looks great. Completely next-gen feeling, especially with HBAO+. It's some of the best lighting I have ever seen, and dark environments look immersive and detailed (using an IPS monitor). I have looked into independent benchmarks on AMD cards are they are pitiful (unless you disable PureHair and Tessellation of course). I have looked into 970 benchmarks and they too are not much better.

I have never seen top end cards fail to dominate current gen titles (with exception to ridiculous things like Crysis and synthetic benchmarks). With the way AA is going, 6GB will very soon not be enough for even Med/High texture quality, forget things like DSR (what kind of dreamer even came up with that super sampling concept?).

If I on a monstrous rig cannot run a maxed out current gen title, I can imagine the pain others are going through whom purchased $500 cards less than a year ago and can't maintain a decent framerate, let alone 60+.

Amanwithplan

[Morgan MLGman]

I've got the game and I run it on an FX-8350 + R9 290X, I have PureHair enabled and Tesselation enabled with shadows on medium, textures on high and level of detail to high, the rest of the settings are turned on besides the motion blur because I hate it, and what's interesting is that PureHair does not cause any framerate drops to me, it looks good and it doesn't decrease performance in any way for me, I assume it's due to DigitalFoundry finding out (when they were testing GTX 970 vs R9 390 in ROTTR) that the 390 performed much better in close-up on Lara scenes and the 970 was better in open-world ones (probably due to tesselation, I'm not sure), so maybe if Radeon cards work well in closeups, they don't "feel" as much performance impact when you turn PureHair on (which is awesome looking btw, MUCH better than ShitWorks HairWorks in terms of looks and performance impact)

I had one, relatively big issue though. When I was in Siberia (an open-world location, caves and tombs not included here), my framerates dropped significantly (regardless of the settings, with the ones I used or with everything turned off, they still dropped so the game was choppy) and I wasn't sure if it's my CPU or it's just the game (Can't get Afterburner OSD to work in this game for some reason)
I suspected it's the CPU because it had spikes of usage to 95%+, but they were occasional and it usually was around 60% across all cores, but it kinda seems like it's the game not working properly yet, because in every other location the game works amazing and it looks BEAUTIFUL

EDIT: @i_build_nanosuits if you haven't played the game yet, go and grab it, I know how much you like good-looking games and this one is arguably the best looking one (graphically) out there atm, the gameplay is good too ^^

[i_build_nanosuits]

5 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

EDIT: @i_build_nanosuits if you haven't played the game yet, go and grab it, I know how much you like good-looking games and this one is arguably the best looking one (graphically) out there atm, the gameplay is good too ^^

Thanks for the heads-up mate i do picked that game on day 1 and i'm playing the shnit out of it ATM i have plans to explore every single tomb and find every little relics and things you can find i LOVE tomb raider and this one is BY FAR the best one i've seen to this day i'm amazed i love the game can't stop playing it it's gorgeous especially at 1440p with the Gsync monitor and the 980ti this is beyond perfect. game is flawless so far IMHO...love it!

[App4that]

My experience is the same as @i_build_nanosuits. Only I use DSR to run it in 1440 on my 1080p monitor. After I turned off Vsync it's been smooth as silk.

[i_build_nanosuits]

Here since this is relevant to this topic (i think) i post the settings i use for the GTX 980ti (single-card) for 2560x1440

i believe they are the perfect settings to use for maximum fidelity vs. framerate and overall best experience (App4that you've seen them already but i know many people read and might like to see and try these) with those settings my VRAM is constently pretty much fully used except in tombs for example where it sometimes drop to 5000mb or something...but the framerates are good (60 to 85FPS i would say with an average of around 68FPS) it's pretty smooth and it does not stutter, it run very well (GTX 980ti is clocked to 1430mhz with 8200mhz memory):

 

 

 

[AManWithPlan]

Sorry, I did forget to add that running the game at 2650x1440 is pure 95fps for me (likely 100 as well if my monitor could handle it, in the process of a replacement). There is something about the extra horizontal real estate of 3440 that chokes the VRAM. I looked into Titan X performance (which has double my VRAM) and did indeed see slightly better frame rates but 4K still choked (and by a lot).

[i_build_nanosuits]

2 minutes ago, AManWithPlan said:

Sorry, I did forget to add that running the game at 2650x1440 is pure 95fps for me (likely 100 as well if my monitor could handle it, in the process of a replacement). There is something about the extra horizontal real estate of 3440 that chokes the VRAM. I looked into Titan X performance (which has double my VRAM) and did indeed see slightly better frame rates but 4K still choked (and by a lot).

have you managed to get the game to run at a 21:9 resolution? some reviewers reported they couldn't get it to work?

[AManWithPlan]

It runs 21:9 native. They probably are not on the beta driver (this is just a guess).

[Praesi]

2560x1440 all ultra with FXAA 40-60fps. SSAA cost way to much performance.

[i_build_nanosuits]

1 minute ago, Praesi said:

2560x1440 all ultra with FXAA 40-60fps. SSAA cost way to much performance.

FXAA is beautiful on a 1440p monitor anyways...i always use FXAA now whenever it's available in games since i got this monitor it does a perfectly fine job of clearing rough edges and shit...looks super sharp and virtualy no performance hit...

 

Try to lower the two shadows options one notch and turn off the blur settings (trash) you'll see your FPS go up a fair amount with no real visual difference (shadows are a bit blurier but it's still way fine, at least for me i don't really tend to look deeply into shadows quality...i don,t really care

try my settings up there and see ^^

[vong]

ROTR doesn't support SLI very well at the moment. Did you try that little hack?

[Praesi]

11 minutes ago, i_build_nanosuits said:

FXAA is beautiful on a 1440p monitor anyways...i always use FXAA now whenever it's available in games since i got this monitor it does a perfectly fine job of clearing rough edges and shit...looks super sharp and virtualy no performance hit...

 

Try to lower the two shadows options one notch and turn off the blur settings (trash) you'll see your FPS go up a fair amount with no real visual difference (shadows are a bit blurier but it's still way fine, at least for me i don't really tend to look deeply into shadows quality...i don,t really care

try my settings up there and see ^^

With Gsync everything is fine in a Game like that. Inside tombs frames are higher.

[AManWithPlan]

19 minutes ago, vong said:

ROTR doesn't support SLI very well at the moment. Did you try that little hack?

 

I have not yet tested this, but will tonight and report back.

[vong]

19 minutes ago, AManWithPlan said:

 

I have not yet tested this, but will tonight and report back.

 

I'm running pretty much the same settings as i_build_nanosuits but at 60hz and SMAA getting over 100fps at 2560x1440p. Going to SSAAx2 gets me around 85fps and going SSAAx4 gets around 60fps.

[vong]

2 minutes ago, vong said:

 

 Double post..

[AManWithPlan]

1 hour ago, vong said:

 

I'm running pretty much the same settings as i_build_nanosuits but at 60hz and SMAA getting over 100fps at 2560x1440p. Going to SSAAx2 gets me around 85fps and going SSAAx4 gets around 60fps.

 

Yea 2560x1440 gets ridiculously better frames than 3440x1440. Will try the profile adjustment tonight and let you know what kind of bump I get.

 

By the way, did anyone else notice that when you first launch the game and load a save file, frame rate is like 20% lower but jumps back up in about 10 seconds or so of moving around? Might just be a Gsync issue, but it was still quite odd.

[i_build_nanosuits]

26 minutes ago, AManWithPlan said:

 

Yea 2560x1440 gets ridiculously better frames than 3440x1440. Will try the profile adjustment tonight and let you know what kind of bump I get.

 

By the way, did anyone else notice that when you first launch the game and load a save file, frame rate is like 20% lower but jumps back up in about 10 seconds or so of moving around? Might just be a Gsync issue, but it was still quite odd.

i tend to alt-tab out of the game a lot and i do see those FPS being lower when i get back in the game and they slowly rise back to where they are supposed to be...there is still some optimisation to do in this game i believe it's not perfect just yet the next driver from nvidia and hopefuly a patch for the game could potentialy solve some problems and improve performance even though i must say for the visual quality presented here this title still run quite well IMHO....stunning graphics like that come at a cost which is fair but it could be even a bit better they have a very solid game engine for this title and it's been out for a while.

[AManWithPlan]

The custom profile through Nvidia Inspector did not make any impact to performance.

[AManWithPlan]

18 hours ago, i_build_nanosuits said:

i tend to alt-tab out of the game a lot and i do see those FPS being lower when i get back in the game and they slowly rise back to where they are supposed to be...there is still some optimisation to do in this game i believe it's not perfect just yet the next driver from nvidia and hopefuly a patch for the game could potentialy solve some problems and improve performance even though i must say for the visual quality presented here this title still run quite well IMHO....stunning graphics like that come at a cost which is fair but it could be even a bit better they have a very solid game engine for this title and it's been out for a while.

Alt Tab would cause my game window to permanently black screen due to the exclusive fullscreen option. Without this option, Gsync doesn't work well.

[i_build_nanosuits]

2 minutes ago, AManWithPlan said:

Alt Tab would cause my game window to permanently black screen due to the exclusive fullscreen option. Without this option, Gsync doesn't work well.

i use exclussive full screen, gsync work 100% fine and i can alt-tab in and out the game without a hitch (except like i said the first 5 seconds...it start at like 45FPS and slowly climb back to 75FPS and then it's all good.

[vong]

14 hours ago, AManWithPlan said:

The custom profile through Nvidia Inspector did not make any impact to performance.

That's a shame. Was looking at getting the Pg348 and wanted to see some proper sli performance for ultrawide.

[afyeung]

The game looks amazing! I think the looks warrant the performance hit. I can't wait to try it out on my cfx setup. I plan to turn down the textures to high and leave Nvidia settings off. Hopefully that'll give me a nice 60. 

[AManWithPlan]

So here is a strange update, after replacing my Predator x34 with an RMA I gained 10-15 frames in Rise of Tomb Raider. It makes absolutely no sense but facts are facts. I am now running anywhere from 65-75 average.

 

This is true of other games as well. GTAV would never run at 100fps, until now.