Rise of the Tomb Raider DirectX 12 Performance Update

Conclusion 

 

With the addition of Asynchronous Compute support to Rise of the Tomb Raider the game’s performance under DirectX 12 has never been better for GPUs that support it. Even GPUs without support like the GTX 980Ti have seen some large increases in minimum framerates under DirectX 12, making the game perform a lot better under the new API.  

Sadly Rise of the Tomb Raider is still a mixed bag as far as DirectX 12 is concerned, offering a huge performance boost for AMD’s GCN 1.1 or newer GPUs while offering Nvidia’s Maxwell or older GPUs a performance decrease when compared to the DirectX 11 version of the game. 

When testing this game it is a real shame that we do not have two matching GPUs to test on both the AMD and Nvidia sides, or a newer Nvidia Pascal or AMD Polaris GPU to test, but this is something that we are working on addressing in the near future.

To summarise this testing this new update for the DirectX 12 version of Rise of the Tomb Raider actually makes DirectX 12 worth using if you own an AMD GPU, with Nvidia users (at least those with maxwell or older GPUs) being better off using the DirectX 11 version of the game for the best performance. 

Over the past few months we can be sure that Nixxes and Square Enix have learned a lot about DirectX 12, hopefully meaning that future DirectX 12 games from them will offer enhanced performance when compared to their DirextX 11 counterparts. 

DirectX 12 and other low-level APIs presents a new challenge for video game developers, requiring more work and skill on their part in order to get the most performance out of their games as well as placing the burden of Multi-GPU support squarely on their shoulders. Hopefully, as time moves on Developers will learn how to best use this new API in the near future I can see a lot of developers having a few growing pains when it comes to supporting new graphical APIs. 

Hopefully, as time moves on Developers will learn how to best use this new API in the near future I can see a lot of developers having a few growing pains when it comes to supporting new graphical APIs. 

 

You can join the discussion on Rise of the Tomb Raider’s DirectX 12 performance on the OC3D Forums.