Lara Croft is back, this time in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. This is the third installment of the reboot series that catapulted Lara back into the spotlight with great gameplay and excellent visuals. The second game really expanded on the visual fidelity of the first game and even brought DX12 into the mix some time after it's launch. But, it wasn't exactly a great thing for everyone. When the launch of the first generation Ryzen came around there was a pretty nasty problem that arose in that game from testing in DX12 when paired with a GeForce card, significantly worse performance on Ryzen. Bad enough to the point that it garnered quite a bit of negative publicity around it. So I could imagine the concern some would have this time when the game is suggesting DX12 as the first option and actively wanting you to avoid DX11. Have things improved that much that we wouldn't want to use DX11? Even with GeForce who is known for strong DX11 performance? That's what we wanted to find out. That, and thanks to Denuvo DRM we could only change configurations a handful of times before getting locked out.

Testing Methodology

For testing we tried to keep this one fairly simple, since we're targeting one aspect of the game rather than an overall performance comparison. So to do so we went straight to the top of the GPU stack in our office, the GTX 1080 FE and RX Vega 64 LC. I want to take a moment and ask that we stay focused on topic here as this isn't an AMD vs Intel vs GeForce topic, but rather how well does GeForce perform on Ryzen this go around and is there a concern for those looking to play the game. The Radeon card is only included as a counter point of comparison to see how the API is handled by Radeon so we can see if there is anything abnormal happening like what happened in Rise of the Tomb Raider.

In order to pull this off I had to make a run to the local Best Buy and pick up a Z370 board and unfortunately no one around had a Core i7 8700k in stock which is why we are using the Core i5 8600k.

We utilized the games built in benchmark and results provided because they are giving a good amount of information and staying extremely consistent which helps as we're swapping parts and staying laser focused on the results we were looking for. The inclusion of the AVG Frame Rate result as well as the 95th percentile results are very helpful. One metric that was really interesting was the percentage of GPU bound the scenario was, we'll look at that too.

All testing was done at 1920x1080 with no AA and using the 'High' preset.

Test Systems