Shadow of the Tomb Raider system requirements on PC. Tomb Raider: System requirements Tomb raider game system requirements

This is a description of the approximate characteristics that a computer must meet in order for it to be able to run any particular software.

These characteristics can describe the requirements for both hardware (processor type and frequency, amount of RAM, hard drive size) and software environment (operating system, availability of installed system components and services, etc.). Typically, such requirements are drawn up by the software manufacturer or author.

In order for you to play Shadow of the Tomb Raider, your computer must meet certain requirements. There are minimum and recommended system requirements.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider minimum system requirements

The minimum system requirements for Shadow of the Tomb Raider most often indicate the PC configuration on which the game can be run without problems with minimal graphics settings.

Requirements	Minimum
OS:	7, 8, 10 (x64)
CPU:	dual-core Intel Core i3-2130 clocked at 3.4 GHz | quad-core AMD FX-4100 clocked at 3.6 GHz
HDD:	20 GB free space
Video card:	AMD Radeon R7 370 with 2 GB of video memory | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 with 2 GB of video memory

Recommended system requirements for Shadow of the Tomb Raider

The recommended system requirements for Shadow of the Tomb Raider show which computer can run the game on maximum graphics settings and still play without stuttering and with a high number of frames per second (FPS).

Requirements	Featured
OS:	Windows 7, 8, 10 (x64)
CPU:	six-core Intel Core i7-3930K clocked at 3.2 GHz | six-core AMD Ryzen 5 1600 clocked at 3.2 GHz
Optional memory:	16GB
Video card:	AMD Radeon R9 390 with 4 GB of video memory | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 with 4 GB of video memory

For comfortable and productive work or play, you need a computer that meets the recommended requirements. Although there are cases that, despite meeting all the system requirements, the program does not work or works with “buggy” errors.

System and technical requirements may change from time to time, and therefore this document may be modified and/or supplemented.

• Release date: January 28, 2016
• Genre: Action-adventure third person view
• Publisher: Square Enix
• Developer: Crystal Dynamics And Nixxes Software

Rise of the Tomb Raider is another game from the Tomb Raider series, which has been popular for many years, which is a continuation of the 2013 game of the same name, which we remember, among other things, for the fact that it used a physically accurate imitation of the main character’s hair. The sequel to the series was announced back in June 2014 at E3 2014 in Los Angeles, with an expected release date of late 2015 initially announced.

As a result, the game was indeed released on November 10, 2015, but only in the version for the Xbox 360 and Xbox One game consoles from Microsoft. But according to Square Enix's plans, the PC version of Rise of the Tomb Raider was pushed back until January 28, 2016, when it was released. The developer of the tenth game in this series was Crystal Dynamics, but it also received help from Nixxes Software, which usually ported games from consoles to PC.

The developers wanted to continue the adventures of Lara Croft in a place that was significantly different from the landscapes of the previous part. And so, very briefly, the plot of the new game is that Lara went all the way to Russia in search of the secret of immortality. And not just anywhere, but to Siberia, where she fights both with members of the secret organization “Trinity” and with aggressive living creatures, like bears (well, where would Siberia be without them?). The game is about the mythical city of Kitezh, where supposedly only those who are pure in heart and soul can find the way.

We do not touch upon issues of historical authenticity and geographical accuracy; in games with Lara Croft, we are more interested in... no, not just what you immediately thought, but exciting adventures, deadly traps and complex puzzles. Well, excellent graphics, helping to achieve greater realism and deep immersion of the player into the virtual world. The new product is distinguished by the fact that Rise of the Tomb Raider consists of several fairly large and diverse locations, significantly larger in size than the levels of the previous game.

Rise of the Tomb Raider was released as part of Nvidia's The Way It's Meant To Be Played program, which is expressed in technical and marketing cooperation between Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics on the one hand, and Nvidia on the other. In addition to adding some rendering techniques to the game, which we'll talk about later, this also translates into optimizing the game for the GeForce GTX family of GPUs right from launch.

Rise of the Tomb Raider is developed based on the Foundation engine, already known from the previous game, which has been thoroughly improved. It uses the technique of physically correct rendering (Physically Based Rendering), which gives a realistic look to all materials in different lighting conditions, uses HDR rendering and adaptive tone mapping, deferred lighting with imitation of global illumination (Global Illumination) - all this is just enhances the realism of the picture.

The game also uses volumetric lighting, expressed in the effect of visible rays of light God Rays, advanced image post-processing effects, dynamic waves and reflections on the surface of the water, particle systems with the correct calculation of lighting, and the effect of subsurface scattering (subsurface scattering) for more realistic rendering of character skin. Some of these effects are shown in a special video dedicated to graphics technologies:

In particular, developers from Crystal Dynamics, in partnership with Nvidia, have introduced an advanced global shading algorithm, HBAO+, into the game, which has better quality and reduced artifacts compared to other global occlusion techniques and provides greater detail for shaded areas. At the same time, HBAO+ runs quite efficiently on modern GPUs, compared to other common Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) algorithms of similar quality. We will dwell on the most interesting graphics technologies and effects in the game in more detail, but first we will look at the system requirements of the game.

System requirements

Minimum system requirements:

• CPU level Intel Core i3-2100 or equivalent AMD;
• RAM of at least 6 GB;
• video card model GeForce GTX 650 2 GB or Radeon HD 7770 2 GB;
• free storage space 25 GB;

• quad core level processor Intel Core i7-3770 or eight-core AMD FX-8350;
• RAM from 8 GB;
• video card model GeForce GTX 970 or Radeon R9 290X and higher;
• free storage space from 30 GB;
• 64-bit operating system Microsoft Windows 7/8/10 with DirectX 11 or 12.

Nvidia recommends using GeForce GTX 970 or higher video cards for Rise of the Tomb Raider. Moreover, if for Full HD resolution at 60 FPS on average a GeForce GTX 970 video card will be enough, then playing at a resolution of 2560x1440 pixels with high settings and the same 60 FPS will be comfortable only with the top GeForce GTX 980 Ti.

And although the official minimum system requirements for the game are set at GeForce GTX 650, Nvidia recommends using at least a GeForce GTX 750 Ti, but even in this case, setting game quality settings will most likely only be possible at a low level (Low), and the average frame rate will be about 45 FPS. So we can recommend that fans of Lara Croft get a more powerful graphics processor.

Test configuration and testing methodology

Nvidia released a special version of the driver for the announcement of the game on PC - 361.75, which can be downloaded from their website or updated by using the GeForce Experience utility. The difference in performance between versions 361.75 WHQL and 361.43 WHQL is small, but it is there - about 5-7%.

Unfortunately, at the time of our tests, AMD had not yet responded with its driver optimized for Rise of the Tomb Raider, so we simply used the latest version available - Radeon Software Crimson 16.1 Hotfix. But you can be sure that AMD is already working on improving the performance of its GPUs in the new game, and an optimized version of the driver will be released.

We chose The Acropolis level in the Score Attack game mode as a test scene from the game - the load on the GPU in this scene is quite high and reflects the overall 3D performance of the game. Although at some levels and in other conditions it may differ - for example, at the beginning of the game there are smaller locations, but they use other effects, such as a snowstorm.

The level we have chosen does not have snow, but it is quite large in terms of location size, and is distinguished by a large amount of vegetation, characters and graphic effects used. Which we will now talk about in detail - along with determining the impact that changing the basic graphic settings has on the final performance of the game.

Graphic settings and effects

Graphic settings in Rise of the Tomb Raider can be changed both in a separate configurator called from the game launcher (see screenshots) and in the game itself. Moreover, changing any settings is immediately put into effect - without the need to restart the game or level. Only changing the quality of textures requires you to wait additional time to reload resources of the required quality, and all other settings are applied immediately.

On the first tab, you can change the screen resolution (the same as the rendering resolution, if supersampling anti-aliasing is not selected), the screen refresh rate, select the synchronization method and the full-screen anti-aliasing method from the list: Off, FXAA, SMAA, SSAA 2x, SMAA 4x - their quality and We will definitely consider performance.

Additional tab Graphics makes it possible to change many graphical settings of the game, including the quality of textures and their filtering, the level of geometric detail, the quality of shadows and post-processing effects, where you can enable or disable tessellation and the use of advanced PureHair hair rendering, and also select the global shading method: SSAO (On) or HBAO+.

Let's start with the last one. The Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) effect allows you to render a scene with more realistic shadows around objects. This algorithm does not work like typical schemes for rendering dynamic shadows using shadow maps, but creates additional soft shadows on all objects in the scene using post-processing of the finished frame.

To further improve SSAO, Nvidia has developed a more advanced algorithm Horizontal-Based Ambient Occlusion (HBAO) back in 2008, and later it received additional modifications to improve quality and performance and became known as HBAO+. Recent improvements have been made to increase the efficiency of algorithm execution on DirectX 11-compatible graphics cores by optimizing sampling from the depth buffer.

Rise of the Tomb Raider has an option Ambient Occlusion, which allows you to choose from two methods for calculating global occlusion: the SSAO technique created by Microsoft and Crystal Dynamics, which is called Broad Temporal Ambient Obscurance (BTAO) and the HBAO+ technique from Nvidia. Interestingly, the BTAO technique was further improved in the PC version, compared to the Xbox One version, and they turned out to be a very good option in terms of performance and quality, exceeding other techniques in these indicators. But HBAO+ allows you to get even better shading.

The simple HBAO algorithm is most often rendered at half resolution, as in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3, which reduces the quality of the overall effect and can cause flickering in some areas, which had to be hidden in Battlefield 3 using additional filtering, but the problem is not solved fully. To eliminate this, Nvidia developers have completely redesigned the Screen Space Ambient Occlusion effect, creating the HBAO+ algorithm, which doubles the detail of the global occlusion rendering, but is also faster than regular HBAO, as it uses the new features of DirectX 11.

In addition, the result of HBAO+ looks better than the image processed with HBAO, especially in scenes with a lot of small objects such as grass and leaves, which is one of the disadvantages of the original algorithm. As a result, HBAO+ produces more accurate global occlusion with high-quality shadows, while rendering the effect 30% faster than regular HBAO.

Let's see what the application of these effects gives in practice. The following are fragments of the frame, which show the difference between different shading methods, and clicking on a fragment of the image opens the full frame obtained using the specified Ambient Occlusion technique.

Ambient Occlusion Off

Ambient Occlusion On (SSAO)

HBAO+ On

As you can see in the screenshots, compared to the SSAO algorithm we are already familiar with, the HBAO+ post-processing effect produces even deeper and more realistic shadows in many cases, although with a slightly greater negative impact on overall performance, which we will look at next:

The performance impact of enabling Ambient Occlusion in Rise of the Tomb Raider varies depending on specific levels and scenes. Enabling SSAO (more precisely, BTAO - the setting is called On in the game) has a very slight effect on performance, but forcing HBAO+ causes a more significant drop in speed. Accordingly, for powerful systems with top GPUs, we recommend using HBAO+ as the highest quality method, and for others, the SSAO method will be preferable, as an excellent compromise between quality and rendering speed. We do not recommend disabling global shading even on medium-power systems; you will lose too much in quality.

Selecting the full screen anti-aliasing method ( Anti-aliasing in the game settings) in Rise of the Tomb Raider for most systems is clear - FXAA, since the most common multisampling method (Multisample Anti-Aliasing - MSAA) is not supported by the game. FXAA is a very fast post-processing filter that smoothes the edges of polygons and textures, although not perfectly, but with a certain quality. Side effects of the method include severe blurring of textures and the appearance of temporal aliasing artifacts in the form of “jumping” pixels, clearly visible in dynamics.

As an alternative method, another post-processing method can be used - SMAA, but it also has disadvantages, albeit to a lesser extent. The highest quality anti-aliasing method in the game is supersampling Anti-Aliasing (SSAA). Supersampling works similarly to technology Nvidia Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR), which increases the rendering resolution and then reduces the result to a lower resolution using a special filter.

So, for a Full HD resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, the SSAA 2x method will render the game at a resolution of 2688x1512 pixels and then convert the image to Full HD, and SSAA 4x will do the same, but at a rendering resolution of 3840x2160 pixels. It is not surprising that the result is a very high level of detail and a perfectly smoothed picture - this applies to everything: polygon edges and textures. You can see this for yourself:

Antialiasing Off

FXAA

SSAA 2x

And SSAA 4x will provide even better anti-aliasing. Unfortunately, high SSAA quality has a logical drawback in the form of a noticeable decrease in performance, similar to an increase in screen resolution. For video cards of the GeForce GTX 960 and Radeon R9 380 level, this method cannot be called practical, since enabling even SSAA 2x leads to an almost one and a half times drop in rendering speed - up to 32 FPS on average, with a drop in the minimum frequency to 24-25 FPS. The use of SSAA in such cases can only be recommended to fans of high-quality images and leisurely gameplay. Well, for owners of more powerful video cards (or better yet, dual-chip systems), of course.

Compared to the console versions, it should also be noted that there is support for anisotropic texture filtering for all surfaces in the scene. Actually, this is a plus for Rise of the Tomb Raider only in comparison with the console versions of the game, because anisotropic filtering has not been uncommon in PC games for many years now.

Settings Anisotropic Filter allows you to change the level of anisotropic filtering for textures in the game, which affects the clarity of textures visible away from the camera for surfaces at sharp angles. Without enabling anisotropic filtering, many of the surfaces will be heavily blurred, which significantly reduces image quality.

On modern systems there is no point in choosing trilinear filtering, since enabling anisotropic filtering does not reduce the speed as significantly as it degrades the quality of textures in the game. The difference in rendering speed between 2x and 16x levels does not exceed 1-2 frames per second, so on modern GPUs we strongly recommend using high values ​​for this setting.

Effects Bloom And Depth of field we have discussed this many times in our early materials. The first of them enhances the glow of bright areas of the frame, adding brightness and a halo effect to them, and the second is used to give a cinematic look mainly in scenes in the engine, blurring the background in a similar way to cinema lenses. The DoF effect is also used in snowstorms and underwater, and in some cases when game scripts are triggered. Such effects do not take up too much productivity and it is recommended to leave them enabled if you have enough performance and like a soft, “cinematic” picture.

Settings Dynamic Foliage responsible for the richness and behavior of vegetation. New to the games in this series is dynamic vegetation: trees and grass in Rise of the Tomb Raider are not just static objects, but realistically interact with the wind, the player and other objects, physically believable bending and deviating from them.

If in the console version Lara's movements affected only rare plant objects, then in the PC version the vegetation has become denser and all of it is now subject to physical influence from the character and weather conditions - grass and trees are in constant motion, which adds realism. When set to High, vegetation sways under the influence of the wind and deviates from the bodies of moving characters and animals.

The High level setting has a serious impact on performance; the drop in frame rate can reach 5-10 frames per second on average, depending on the richness of the level with bushes, grass and trees. In case of lack of performance, and as a good compromise, you can enable the setting to the average value, which does not reduce plant density too much, but is less expensive in terms of GPU resources.

Parameter Level of Detail, as its name implies, is responsible for the geometric detailing of the scene. More precisely, not only for the level of detail, but also for the range of drawing objects at medium and long distances. This setting allows you to find the right balance between scene detail and rendering performance, which is especially important on weaker systems.

Enabling the technology does not have a big impact on performance, even when the setting is set to Very High. But this influence is most noticeable at levels with a large number of objects, light sources and various effects, where the difference between the minimum and maximum levels of detail can reach up to 5-7 frames on average.

Option PureHair is responsible for incorporating character hair rendering technology developed by Crystal Dynamics and similar to Nvidia HairWorks and AMD TressFX - all of which add physically correct interaction of tens of thousands of hairs to character models. Such hair realistically interacts with other objects, clothing, and sways physically correctly when moving and under the influence of wind and water. They also provide more realistic lighting and shading compared to more conventional hair rendering methods.

PureHair's technology may have its roots in AMD's TressFX, but it has clearly been improved in the area of ​​hair interaction with its environment while reducing artifacts. The technology is enabled in the game’s graphic settings and can be set at two levels: On and Very High.

In Rise of the Tomb Raider, up to 30,000 hairs can be used for Lara's head, but their behavior is not calculated for everyone individually, but in bunches, which reduces the demands on resources. When the technology is turned off (Off option), traditional hair is drawn in the old style, when PureHair is turned on, the average level of hair detail is turned on, and the “Very High” setting noticeably increases the number of calculated hairs.

PureHair Off

PureHair On

PureHair Very High

The impact of the enabled effect on average performance during typical gameplay reaches 3-4 frames per second on average for a high value, but in engine scenes with close-ups it can reach 15-20 FPS.

But during normal gameplay, the difference between the two PureHair modes is almost impossible to discern - you most often see Lara in the distance, where individual hairs are not visible, and in the cinematic scenes in the engine, in any case, a higher level of detail is used. Therefore, for most players, the best choice will be On, since you simply will not notice the difference, and an extra 1-2 frames per second will not hurt.

Enabling PureHair adds realism to Lara, especially when she is actively moving: running, jumping, fighting enemies. And we would recommend enabling the setting even if you have a mid-level video card. Although regular hair looks good, some may even like it better - besides, some kind of movement is also calculated for them.

Settings Shadow Quality affects the quality of shadows in Rise of the Tomb Raider, which is not surprising. This parameter exclusively affects the resolution of shadow maps and their detail. In contrast to the highest setting, when set to High, some fine shadow details are lost, at the Medium level there are even more losses, and shadow flickering artifacts begin to appear when moving.

And yet shadows are the most important component of the picture, directly affecting realism. When you turn off shadows completely (Off), all dynamic shadows and most static ones are removed. The impact of this parameter on the picture is enormous, and it is recommended to disable shadows only for the weakest systems. In fact, this setting has a noticeable effect on game performance; the difference between the extreme values ​​is approximately one and a half times.

Additional settings also apply to the quality of shadows. Sun Soft Shadows, which adjusts the softness of the edges of shadows cast by sunlight. The effect is best seen in shadows from vegetation, but the blurriness of shadows from characters also changes. But this setting has little effect on performance; turning on shadow blur even at the highest quality causes FPS to drop by just a couple of frames, so it is recommended to keep it at a high level.

One of the most interesting settings of the game in question is the tessellation setting - Tessellation. In Rise of the Tomb Raider, hardware tessellation is used for many surfaces: walls, ground, rocks and other similar objects. This significantly increases the level of detail and volume of the scene, greatly adding realism. For example, you can note levels with a lot of snow, where tessellation is used to render the snow cover and tracks from Lara and other characters. This effect is generally similar to the Nvidia technology used in the game Batman: Arkham Origins:

The snow cover reacts to the player's actions and dynamically changes its shape, pressing down when walking - for this effect an additional layer of snow is used, the height of which is set in a special texture - a height map. And when the characters move, the heights of specific texels change dynamically so that imprints are left on the snow. As a result, it looks quite good and realistic - in this case, the footprints in the snow are voluminous and look like real ones. Without tessellation enabled in the game, snow deformation is calculated only in selected scenes, and in other places volumetric traces are replaced by texture spots from the last century.

Also, in almost every level from the PC version of Rise of the Tomb Raider, tessellation is used to increase the level of detail of many objects: walls, stones, ground, tree bark and other surfaces. Moreover, all this additional geometric detail is used to calculate the global occlusion of SSAO or HBAO+, which only adds to the realism of the picture.

Tessellation Off

Tessellation On

The effect the setting has on performance is not that great - 7-9%, especially for Nvidia video cards based on top GPUs, which have simply enormous geometric performance. And on other video cards, we recommend leaving tessellation enabled, since it significantly adds detail and realism to the picture, and is relatively inexpensive even on mid-level GPUs, as we used.

The high geometric performance of modern graphics processors on PCs makes it possible to use greater draw distances compared to console versions, as well as increase the level of geometric detail for objects in the scene, which positively affects the realism of large open spaces and helps the player with orientation on the ground.

The next parameter considered is Texture Quality, this is a resolution setting for textures used throughout Rise of the Tomb Raider. Texture quality is quite important for our comparison, as this particular setting can bring the 2GB version of the GeForce GTX 960 we're using to its knees, while the Radeon R9 380 4GB may gain some advantage.

From the point of view of the impact on the final quality, in normal gameplay it will be very difficult to find a significant difference between the High and Very High values ​​- it is noticeable only on some objects that are close to the camera, and on characters in close-ups. But below the High level, texture detail becomes noticeable almost always and on all surfaces. You can see this for yourself:

Texture Quality Low

Texture Quality Medium

Texture Quality High

Texture Quality Very High

If in the first three modes the performance of the pair of test video cards is comparable, then with the setting set to Very High, textures can reach a resolution of 4096x4096 texels, and the requirements for video memory in this option sharply increase to 3-4 GB, depending on the resolution rendering, and here our GeForce GTX 960 with its couple of gigabytes of local video memory copes poorly with the task:

And even for 3 GB video cards, we can recommend using the High setting, since otherwise performance drops below a comfortable frame rate may be observed, especially in the moments between the gameplay and scenes on the engine, which are also present in our test fragment.

If textures, buffers and other resources are included in the local memory of the video card, the effect of the setting on performance is quite insignificant - around 1-2 FPS. But even the 4 GB version of the Radeon R9 380 lost quite a lot when the Very High option was enabled, not to mention the two GB GeForce. So for maximum texture quality, more than 4 GB of local video memory is desirable - something like 6-8 GB, especially if the rendering resolution is high and/or supersampling is used.

Settings Screen Space Reflections responsible for enabling realistic reflections on many surfaces in Rise of the Tomb Raider. The most obvious effect of this setting is the reflection of the surrounding world on water surfaces, which significantly improves the perception of the game world. The performance difference between enabling and disabling the effect in this game is negligible - a couple of frames per second (this depends on the level and scene).

Options like Lens Flares, Screen Effects, Vignette Blur And Motion Blur are also post-processing filters used in some scenes. Most often, their inclusion has little effect on overall performance - less than 1 FPS, and some of them still need to be bothered to be noticed on the screen. In general, we can recommend leaving them turned on, as they add a significant amount to the cinematic realism of the picture, especially in cutscenes on the game engine.

Among the Nvidia technologies supported by the game, we can note several more. Since we used a monitor in tests Asus ROG Swift PG278Q technology-enabled Nvidia G-Sync, then we could not bypass this possibility. In Rise of the Tomb Raider, when G-Sync is enabled on a GeForce GTX 960 graphics card at high settings at 1920x1080 resolution, performance is quite high, and even in cases where the frame rate is approximately 40 FPS, the gaming system supports G -Sync shows very smooth video without problems with jerking and image tearing.

For another proprietary technology from Nvidia - Dynamic Super Resolution and its competitor's counterpart, our test cards are simply too underpowered. They don’t even have enough video memory to render at an even higher resolution, and their computing power is clearly not enough. But DSR will be useful for those players who, for some reason, have a Full HD monitor and a video card of the GeForce GTX 980 level or higher - in such conditions, you can enable DSR, getting a detailed resolution of 2560x1440 on a Full HD monitor.

And the utility offered by Nvidia GeForce Experience, which is included with the drivers, allows you to help find the optimal settings for a specific system with just a couple of mouse clicks. To configure Rise of the Tomb Raider to run smoothly at 60 FPS on average, you simply need to launch the GeForce Experience utility and click a button that applies optimized settings automatically received from the company's server.

Depending on the graphics and central processor available in the user’s system, as well as other factors, the GeForce Experience utility selects settings that will be optimal for the majority of users who do not want to waste time on their own selection, but simply plan to immediately play with maximum comfort.

For example, for the test GeForce GTX 960 2 GB, the utility selected generally quite reasonable settings, at which the performance will be quite comfortable and the picture quality will be close to optimal. Although, in our opinion, you can change a couple of settings to a higher level, getting, if not 60 FPS on average, but 45 FPS with the best quality - quite enough for a game of this genre.

In addition to the task of optimizing game settings, the GeForce Experience utility is also responsible for automatically updating drivers and game profiles; it is she who manages the recording and streaming of video streams from games using technology Nvidia ShadowPlay, and can also transmit a video stream from a PC to Nvidia Shield series mobile devices - so that you can play PC games on them, including Rise of the Tomb Raider, by the way.

Performance testing

As part of our research, we tested the performance of two video cards based on GPUs from Nvidia and AMD in two of the most common screen resolutions: 1920×1080 and 2560×1440, as well as at three different settings levels that the game itself sets when selecting the appropriate presets profiles: Medium, High and Very High.

There is simply no point in considering low-level settings Low and below on mid-level video cards, and we traditionally check very high profiles, since this is the most common option for PC gaming enthusiasts. Let's first consider the most popular Full HD resolution.

Resolution 1920x1080 (Full HD)

With medium rendering quality settings, both video cards show a high level of performance, approaching an average 60 FPS, which is even more than necessary for a game of this genre. But although the Radeon R9 380 shows a higher maximum frame rate, it has a much lower minimum frame rate compared to its competing GeForce GTX 960. This is due to the lack of optimization of video drivers - it seems that Nvidia has done a good job on this, but AMD has not yet managed to do so. And 30 minimum frames per second is already at the limit. Let's see what changes with high quality.

Curiously, there are fewer changes than one might expect. The average frame rate has dropped to 45 FPS for both video cards, but the Radeon still provides a noticeably lower minimum frame rate, which this time has already dropped below the minimum comfortable level of 30 FPS. However, perhaps such a frame rate is observed in scenes on the engine or during the transition from gameplay to cutscenes on the engine, which has little effect on the comfort of the game itself. In any case, for now we note a slight advantage for the GeForce GTX 960, but this may change when the settings are increased...

And so it happened! At the Very High settings level, textures of maximum quality with resolution up to 4K are loaded, and they clearly lack a couple of gigabytes of memory, especially if they need to be shared with the frame buffer and other resources. In this mode, the GeForce GTX 960 2 GB cannot cope with the work and 10.5 FPS on average cannot be called playable. However, the Radeon R9 380, even with 4 GB, is not far off - at a minimum frame rate of 13 FPS you won’t be able to play much, and their average number of 32.7 will not save the situation. Both video cards do not provide comfortable performance in this mode.

To understand how often video cards do not provide a sufficient level of frame rate, let's look at the graph of the frame rate averaged per second in the optimal mode for both video cards - with the High presets.

Judging by this graph, it turns out that both video cards are almost on par, providing similar performance down to the details - you can see where the Radeon R9 380 shows a higher maximum frame rate, and where it drops below the GeForce in terms of minimum FPS - the latter actually happens the difficult part of the test fragment - at the end, when the videos on the engine are replaced by gameplay. Let's see what changes when we increase the resolution.

Resolution 2560x1440 (WQHD)

First we consider the mode of medium rendering quality settings - alas, with a rendering resolution of 2560x1440 pixels, the test GeForce GTX 960 video card, which has only 2 GB of local memory, noticeably dropped down even with medium graphics settings. From this fact we draw two conclusions: firstly, the game Rise of the Tomb Raider in WQHD resolution definitely needs 4 GB of video memory, and secondly, we need to look for a replacement for the test GeForce GTX 960 with a four GB version.

As for playability on the Radeon R9 380 at medium settings in this resolution, with certain discounts this performance can be called the minimum acceptable, although in even more crowded scenes with a large number of characters and additional effects, performance may fall below a comfortable level.

It is not at all surprising that with high quality settings we got approximately the same layout, but with smaller numbers. Although the GeForce GTX 960 fell even lower, the Radeon R9 380 has already been added to it - it would be hard to call 32.4 FPS on average a comfortable performance. So, starting with high settings, at a resolution of 2560x1440, the middle class of video cards can be considered unplayable. And the highest settings could not even be tested.

Purely for show, we did it anyway, getting even lower numbers with huge dips in frame rates on both video cards. And while the Radeon R9 380 4GB, with twice the memory, has more than double the advantage here across the board, it also delivers sub-par rendering speeds. It looks like Nvidia is right, and such settings will only be playable on a video card of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti level.

To see how much of an impact the GeForce GTX 960 has half the amount of video memory, let’s turn our attention to the frame rate graph in the same settings profile – High – at a higher resolution.

It is clearly seen that the inability to load all the textures of the required resolution into the 2 GB local memory available on the test GeForce GTX 960 causes not just one-time drops in the frame rate and rare drops, but also an average lower frame rate, although somewhere in the middle During the test period, the performance of Radeon and GeForce was almost equal. But when scripted videos appear on the engine at the end of the test, GeForce is again unable to show a stable frame rate due to lack of video memory.

Visual video test

As a bonus, we have attached several videos in which you can see how the game Rise of the Tomb Raider behaves with different graphics settings presets on a system with a GeForce GTX 960 2 GB video card at a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels. These videos were recorded using GeForce Experience, which features a built-in nearly performance-free video recording capability called ShadowPlay.

Lowest quality (Lowest profile)

Low quality (Low profile)

Average quality (Medium profile)

High quality (High profile)

Very high quality (Very High profile)

It is clearly visible that rendering in the lowest quality looks very bad and is only suitable for owners of integrated graphics, while everyone else can be advised to choose other profiles and settings, depending on the power of the system.

For the Very High profile, the test system with a GeForce GTX 960 2 GB simply did not have enough video memory, which is why constant jerks and slowdowns are visible in the last video. On the same video card with 4 GB of memory, everything would be much better - do not spare money, buy a video card with at least 4 gigabytes of memory! Yes, and we will try to find a replacement for our further gaming tests.

Conclusion

Summing up the results of the study, I would like to note that in the game Rise of the Tomb Raider we saw very decent graphics, which were technologically performed at the most modern level. The game uses all the currently fashionable effects and algorithms: physically correct HDR rendering, deferred lighting, global shading using Nvidia's HBAO+ method, volumetric lighting, advanced post-processing effects, dynamic reflections, tessellation is actively used to increase scene detail, there are particle systems, a subsurface effect dispersion, etc.

The game also contains original technologies, such as the physically correct imitation of PureHair hair. Well, in addition to the mentioned effects, do not forget about the usual advantages of the PC versions, such as significantly higher texture resolution and rendering, at a higher frame rate (if you have sufficiently powerful GPUs).

In this article we tried to determine the optimal settings for video cards of different levels. For example, the FXAA anti-aliasing method can be called optimal for most systems, but some may find it too blurry. In addition, FXAA does not take into account the temporal component, which has practically become a standard in modern game projects. And in the game Rise of the Tomb Raider, a more advanced Temporal Anti-Aliasing filter would be very useful. Of course, there is the option of supersampling using the SSAA 2x and SSAA 4x methods, but they are too demanding on GPU power even in Full HD resolution.

It's possible that Rise of the Tomb Raider's graphics will improve further in the future if Crystal Dynamics implements DirectX 12 support in future patches. It would be nice if owners of powerful modern video cards had the opportunity to enable an even more advanced method for calculating global shading - Voxel Based Ambient Occlusion (VXAO), which the developer mentioned earlier.

In our materials from the GPU Technology Conference 2015, we talked about a similar technology Nvidia VXGI (Voxel Global Illumination), and it would be very interesting if such an opportunity appeared in the game. The use of VXAO could benefit Nvidia's Maxwell GPUs as it makes extensive use of DirectX 12's new Rasterized Ordered Views (ROV) feature included in Feature Level 12_1.

But even in its current form, Rise of the Tomb Raider turned out to be quite demanding on the power of GPUs. As with the amount of video memory, by the way - for high settings, even in Full HD resolution, a video card with 3 gigabytes of memory is desirable, and at higher settings - 4 GB or more. That is why our existing GeForce GTX 960 2 GB was initially at a disadvantage relative to its competitor in the form of the Radeon R9 380 4 GB. That is why video cards such as the Radeon R9 280(X) have some advantage due to the memory capacity of 3 gigabytes, which may be enough for high settings at least in Full HD resolution.

And on systems with 2 GB video cards, in some places in the game there are obvious slowdowns and frame rate drops below a comfortable value when textures, buffers and other resources do not fit into this amount of memory. The performance loss on GeForce at high and very high settings in this game was mainly due to the lack of memory, and this is solved by choosing the GeForce GTX 960 with 4 GB memory that is sold in the market.

But if we do not take into account the difference in the amount of video memory, then in the conditions we tested, an approximately equal level of 3D performance is confirmed for the GeForce GTX 960 and Radeon R9 380 video cards, presented in our material by video cards manufactured by Palit and Sapphire. These solutions turned out to be close to each other in Rise of the Tomb Raider, although AMD has not yet optimized the drivers properly and the Radeon R9 380 is inferior to its competitor from Nvidia in terms of the minimum frame rate.

The mid-price video cards presented in our comparison handled gaming in Full HD resolution at high settings; they are both sufficient for gaming in such conditions and provide comfortable performance. But at a higher resolution of 2560x1440 pixels, the GeForce clearly lacks the amount of video memory, and the Radeon power is only enough for medium quality settings, and even then with reservations. So owners of monitors with this resolution will have to lower the settings or upgrade their video systems.

Finally, we note that Nvidia is offering customers who choose video cards GeForce GTX 970 and higher, as well as computers and laptops based on these solutions (laptops require a GeForce GTX 970M video core and higher) until February 16, a bonus in the form of a digital copy of the game Rise of the Tomb Raider. You can read more about this at, you have two weeks to think about it.

Before purchasing Shadow of the Tomb Raider on PC, be sure to check the system requirements provided by the developer with your system configuration. Remember that the minimum requirements often mean that with this configuration the game will launch and run reliably at minimum quality settings. If your PC meets the recommended requirements, you can expect stable gameplay at high graphics settings. If you want to play at quality set to “ultra”, the hardware in your PC must be even better than the developers indicate in the recommended requirements.

Below are the system requirements of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, officially provided by the project developers. If you think there is an error in them, please let us know by clicking the exclamation mark on the right side of the screen and briefly describing the error.

Minimum configuration:

• OS: Windows 7 (64-bit)
• Processor: Intel i3-3220
• Memory: 8 GB
• Video: Nvidia GTX 660/GTX 1050/AMD Radeon HD 7770
• HDD: 40 GB
• DirectX: 11

• OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)
• Processor: Intel Core i7 4770K 3.40 GHz/AMD Ryzen 5 1600 3.20 GHz
• Memory: 16 GB
• Video: Nvidia GTX 1060, 6 GB/AMD Radeon RX 480, 8 GB
• HDD: 40 GB
• DirectX: 12

In addition to checking the system requirements of Shadow of the Tomb Raider with your PC configuration, do not forget to update your video card drivers. It is important to remember that you should only download the final versions of video cards - try not to use beta versions, as they may have a large number of unfound and unfixed errors.

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Square Enix published Tomb Raider system requirements. Windows XP users will be happy to hear that their operating system meets the system requirements and they can play Tomb Raider on their computers.

PC version Tomb Raider uses Steamworks for creating online matches, cloud storage for storing game records, and a system of awards and achievements. Tomb Raider supports " Big Picture"on Steam and a gamepad, but you can also play with a mouse and keyboard.

If you have a powerful gaming PC, then you can enjoy higher quality textures than those who own gaming consoles. IN Tomb Raider supported AMD Eyefinity And NVIDIA Surround, which will allow you to use the capabilities of a system with multiple monitors. If your computer does not fit the description of high-end gaming systems, but does meet the system requirements, then you can still enjoy the game, but with more modest graphics settings. Crystal Dynamics and Nixxes tried to make Tomb Raider scalable game and compatible with older systems, so the game can function normally on Windows XP with DirectX 9.

« We felt it was important that all Tomb Raider fans could play this version of the game and tried to make support for operating systems as wide as possible", says the official Tomb Raider blog. " Thus, unlike some other recent games, we still support Windows XP, and our game also works on Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Although it is not certified for Windows 8, but after numerous tests with Windows 8 systems, we We can confidently say that Windows 8 users will be able to enjoy playing Tomb Raider.»

Tomb Raider Minimum System Requirements

operating system: Windows XP (Service Pack 3)\Vista\7\8 (32 and 64 bit)
Video card: Supports DirectX 9 with 512 MB VRAM (AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT and above, nVidia 8600 and above)
CPU: Dual core AMD Athlon64 X2*2.1 GHz (4050+) and higher, Intel Core2 Duo 1.86 GHz (E6300) and higher
RAM: 1 GB (2GB for Windows Vista) operating system: Windows Vista\7\8 (32 and 64 bit)
Video card: Supports DirectX 11 with 1 GB VRAM (AMD Radeon HD 5870 and above, nVidia GTX 480 and above)
CPU: Quad-core AMD Phenom II X2*565 and higher, Intel Core i5-750 and higher
RAM: 4GB

Tomb Raider system requirements announced on Steam

operating system: Windows XP, Vista, 7
CPU: 2GHz Dual Core (Intel Core 2 Duo or better, AMD Athlon X2 or better)
RAM: 1 GB (Windows XP), 2 GB (Windows Vista\7)
Video card: nVIDIA GeForce 8800/AMD Radeon HD 2900 or better

Improvements compared to the console version of Tomb Raider

General improvements

• Full integration with Steamworks for cloud storage of recordings, creating online games, achievements, as well as automatic updates and downloadable content
• Steam mode support " Big Picture»
• Customizable mouse and keyboard
• Gamepad support

High-quality graphics for high-end PC

• High resolution textures
• Detailed tessellation to improve the quality of surface detail in the game
• High quality shadows
• High quality bokeh
• Using Tessellation Algorithms to Smooth Geometry
• SSOA and post effects filters
• Regulating LOD quality on high-end computers

Low-quality graphics for low-end PC

• Crystal Dynamics took care of Tomb Raider fans who do not have a high-end PC and did everything possible to ensure that the game would function on older PCs running Windows XP SP3.
• The ability to scale performance and graphics settings to accommodate a large number of different PC configurations.

Questions and answers

A few common technical questions regarding Tomb Raider to which Nixxes director Juren Katsman responded.

Will Tomb Raider support Steam offline mode?

“Yes, of course, the game will work in offline mode, but you will not be able to participate in multiplayer games in this mode.”

If I buy the boxed version of Tomb Raider, can I play it through Steam?

“Every copy of Tomb Raider is integrated with Steam and uses the power of Steamworks, no matter where you bought it.”

Does the game require a disc or can it be downloaded via Steam using a cd key?

“When you buy a game in the store, you get a CD key for Steam. Just activate the key through your Steam account and you won't need the disk. The disc is needed so that you don't have to download the entire game. Just install the game from it and download updates."

Will Tomb Raider have DRM?

“We don't believe in anti-consumer DRM practices, so other than Steamworks and the need to authenticate with your Steam account, there is no DRM of any kind.”

Does Tomb Raider support 120Hz?

“On equipment that supports 120 Hz, it will certainly work with support for 120 Hz. We do not limit the refresh rate or frame rate in the game. Tomb Raider will run at any refresh rate and frame rate your hardware can support."

What are your big screen plans for Tomb Raider?

“We support AMD Eyefinity and NVIDIA Surround, which allow you to connect multiple monitors and create very wide screens.”

Buy