After months of waiting Shadow of the Tomb Raider finally got the Ray-Traced Shadow update. It has been a bit more of a wait than anticipated since it was one of the original games showcased at the reveal of the RTX cards back in August of 2018 and was the first game launched that was on the DXR road map. There were initial concerns around performance as the original showing had the RTX 2080Ti running pretty low frame rates at 1080p. But, we were reminded many times that this was still early in development. Now with it out have things changed? Has performance gotten better? Well, let us find out.

Testing Methodology

Testing Shadow of the Tomb Raider for this one was a bit interesting as the performance varied depending on the amount of shadows, so we could have found an area that beat the cards to death or one that made them look better than they were. Since DXR requires DX12 we did all the testing with DX12 enabled. We settled on letting the built in benchmark do it's thing and taking the overall average frame rate result that it gave and the 95th percentile numbers from the GPU results for the minimum area to have a better idea of the low range of frames. For the OFF setting we used the 'Highest' preset and for the RT Shadows numbers we left all settings the same except for the RT Shadows function. For the DLSS settings we used it in conjunction with the 'Ultra' RT Shadows setting but a separate graph for running with DLSS without RT Shadows enabled to see how the game can benefit from just DLSS support. Screenshots below are native 4K with settings applied below the image.

RT Shadows Off

RT Shadows Medium

RT Shadows High

RT Shadows Ultra

RT Shadows Ultra + DLSS

Ray Tracing Details