Rise of the Tomb Raider Performance Review(AMD R9 390x)

[afyeung]

*Make sure your internet can handle the power of 1440p* When performance reports of this game first came out, I was skeptical that the game was even worth picking up. I foolishly judged how the game would look and run based off a 1080p gtx 980 performance vid on youtube. I thought that if the 980 was struggling at 1080p in an Nvidia title, my 390x was screwed.  Well, I was wrong in a lot of ways. Man, does this game look amazing. Not just Lara, but everything including shadows, textures, animations, screen effects, and much more has been revitalized. Lara has to be my favorite improvement though. In the 2013 title, her face was lifeless and distorted at many points in the game. During the cutscenes, the tressfx hair shadows were completely muddled. The 2015 game completely remodels her. Her hair shadows as you can see in the first screenshot are much more clear and realistic, and her face is much more detailed. You can even see the pores lol. Pure Hair does look a lot better than Tressfx, and comes at less of a performance hit.

 

However, performance is where this game falls short, but understandably so. Don't expect a locked 60fps @ 1080p with mid-high tier cards like the 390 and 970, even with lowered settings to somewhat match console image quality. This game just has to many variables that effect performance. At one point my 5820k saw 70% usage  However, just because you're not getting a  smooth 60 fps, does that make the game not enjoyable? Heck, no! First off, if you are looking for a game with mind blowing player interaction, this is definitely not your game. At most points, the game feels like acting in a movie(without the cinematic 24fps lol). At my settings down below(mostly very high), I was getting playable framerates in my opinion. This is the type of title that does not need 60fps for you to play well. Many times you just press a key and watch Lara do something. But, if you are looking for consistently smooth framerate, I'd say anything above 50 fps feels very smooth in this game. Honestly, the visuals and story do outweigh the relatively low performance.

 

Everything just looks a heck of a lot better than pretty much any game I've played. Also, I no longer found myself skipping the cut-scenes unlike the previous game. I was genuinely interested lol. Anyways, for performance, I'd say if you have a gtx 970/390 or above, and an i5 4690k or higher, you'll be enjoying yourself even at 1440p. For the gtx 970, you will have to lower textures to high though, the game uses a stupid amount of VRAM. Almost 7gb at one point. Do note, the framerate WILL be all over the place. I don't think there's much the devs can do about that without drastically changing the game. Even if you do manage to get a min 60fps with a 980ti SLI setup, the fps will jump between the 60s-100s at random unless you enable vsync. For single card users. The best experience is running borderless windowed and leaving v sync off. Also trying to keep your min FPS to 30 is optimal.  Overall, this is an understandably hard game to drive. It basically sets the standard for visual quality of future games. If you can push this game at a locked 60fps with near max settings like I'm using at 1440p or higher, you Sir or Madam, have a rig for the future. Enjoy the screenshots  P.S There is a crossfire profile for this game but more than likely it will crash and burn on my system.  

[sushisharkjl]

Now I get the 10MB pictures.

I'm amazed that the 390x is able to handle (even in bursts) 60FPS with this sort of quality. Have you played through the game? I watched a complete playthrough and I'm wondering if it would be worth playing.

[afyeung]

Just now, sushisharkjl said:

Now I get the 10MB pictures.

I'm amazed that the 390x is able to handle (even in bursts) 60FPS with this sort of quality. Have you played through the game? I watched a complete playthrough and I'm wondering if it would be worth playing.

No lol. Not even close to playing through it. However, from what I've played so far, it's very interesting and gameplay is like the 2013 one. I'd say go for it!

[afyeung]

1 minute ago, sushisharkjl said:

Now I get the 10MB pictures.

I'm amazed that the 390x is able to handle (even in bursts) 60FPS with this sort of quality. Have you played through the game? I watched a complete playthrough and I'm wondering if it would be worth playing.

Also, just realized you have only a HDD in your rig. This game loads really slow on HDDs  according to my friend. I installed it immediately on my SSD

[sushisharkjl]

1 minute ago, afyeung said:

Also, just realized you have only a HDD in your rig. This game loads really slow on HDDs  according to my friend. I installed it immediately on my SSD

Hm, makes sense given the massive textures.

[afyeung]

Just now, sushisharkjl said:

Hm, makes sense given the massive textures.

Yeah. I'd crank them to the max since the 390x has that nice 8gb and it makes almost not performance difference. 

[Citadelen]

On 15 February 2016 at 2:14 AM, afyeung said:

-snip- 

 

Rise of the Tomb raider is a Gaming Evolved title isn't it? They use TressFX 3.0.

[afyeung]

1 hour ago, Citadelen said:

Rise of the Tomb raider is a Gaming Evolved title isn't it? They use TressFX 3.0.

No. Definitely not. It says Nvidia gameworks in the opening title. Also, it's not "TressFX" which is AMD's primitive implementation. TressFX is an open source api which uses direct compute, Crystal Dynamics used that and made it better to make Pure Hair. AMD sort of has nothing to do with Tomb Raider anymore other than they made the basics for TressFX which was improved by Crystal Dynamics to make Pure Hair. 

[Citadelen]

1 hour ago, afyeung said:

No. Definitely not. It says Nvidia gameworks in the opening title. Also, it's not "TressFX" which is AMD's primitive implementation. TressFX is an open source api which uses direct compute, Crystal Dynamics used that and made it better to make Pure Hair. AMD sort of has nothing to do with Tomb Raider anymore other than they made the basics for TressFX which was improved by Crystal Dynamics to make Pure Hair. 

Isn't Pure Hair just a fancy name for TressFX 3.0, I can se that it's a Nvidia title now but everywhere I look it's being coined "AMD Pure Hair".

[afyeung]

1 hour ago, Citadelen said:

Isn't Pure Hair just a fancy name for TressFX 3.0, I can se that it's a Nvidia title now but everywhere I look it's being coined "AMD Pure Hair".

It's not. AMD didn't work on it personally. Crystal Dynamics reprogrammed it. It's a complete Nvidia title 

[Citadelen]

1 minute ago, afyeung said:

It's not. AMD didn't work on it personally. Crystal Dynamics reprogrammed it. It's a complete Nvidia title 

Ahh okay.

[afyeung]

58 minutes ago, Citadelen said:

Ahh okay.

Runs really well though. Got crossfire to work and I saw around 80fps average at 1440p with some settings lowered. Still above the high preset. 

[Citadelen]

2 minutes ago, afyeung said:

Runs really well though. Got crossfire to work and I saw around 80fps average at 1440p with some settings lowered. Still above the high preset. 

Would you say it's the most graphically intensive game around at the moment?

 

[afyeung]

3 minutes ago, Citadelen said:

Would you say it's the most graphically intensive game around at the moment?

 

Yeah. It's the hardest game to max out the actual graphics, not the anti aliasing. Crysis 3 is a bit harder to run because you can have like 8xMSAA, but Tomb Raider rivals it graphics wise. You'll need at least a 980ti or a 970/390 sli/cf setup to get smooth framerates.

[Citadelen]

5 minutes ago, afyeung said:

Yeah. It's the hardest game to max out the actual graphics, not the anti aliasing. Crysis 3 is a bit harder to run because you can have like 8xMSAA, but Tomb Raider rivals it graphics wise. You'll need at least a 980ti or a 970/390 sli/cf setup to get smooth framerates.

I'll be interested in seeing if single Polaris/Pascal cards can full max it out at 60-75FPS stable.

[afyeung]

25 minutes ago, Citadelen said:

I'll be interested in seeing if single Polaris/Pascal cards can full max it out at 60-75FPS stable.

It's not just the GPU that's required to get stable frames, also the CPU needs to be fairly powerful if you don't want huge drops. I'm actually pretty happy with how it performs with $400 in graphics cards

[Citadelen]

2 minutes ago, afyeung said:

It's not just the GPU that's required to get stable frames, also the CPU needs to be fairly powerful if you don't want huge drops. I'm actually pretty happy with how it performs with $400 in graphics cards

It's nice to see games actually utilising CPU's properly, hopefully DX12 will push that trend even further.

[Prysin]

just gonna add this to here