Shadow of the Tomb Raider Graphics Settings Benchmark & Optimization Guide
Shadow of the Tomb Raider Graphics Settings Benchmark & Optimization Guide
2018-09-26
welcome back to hardware box today's
video is the first of what will
hopefully become a series of new videos
on the channel a little project we've
been working on for a while as you'll
have probably already read in the title
this video is a full graphic settings
guide for shadow of the Tomb Raider
complete with benchmarks for every
single graphics setting in the game the
original idea was to get this video out
I guess much closer to the actual launch
of shadow of the Tomb Raider but due to
the Nvidia r-tx launch we kind of
postponed it a bit that content was
probably more important but at least
we're now getting around to providing
you this information and hopefully with
future games
be able to get it out a bit closer to
the launch day so the premise of this
video is pretty simple we're going to
benchmark every graphics setting in
shadow of the Tomb Raider showing you
the visual quality differences through a
bunch of side-by-side comparisons while
also providing a performance breakdown
hopefully you'll be able to see the
differences in settings quality and then
you can use the performance info to see
which settings are the best to use at
the end we'll go through our recommended
picks for each setting to give you the
best balance of visual quality and
performance at least in our opinion and
shown of the Tomb Raider is an
absolutely beautiful game so you'll want
to crank up everything as high as
possible while still delivering a
playable experience for your hardware
all the performance data you're about to
see was captured using my core i7 8700 K
test rig in the be quite dark base 700
we've benchmarked every setting using
flagship GPUs from both AMD and NVIDIA
on the AMD side we have the Radeon rx
Vegas 64 and 4 Nvidia the GeForce r-tx
2080 ti as AMD and NVIDIA used different
graphics architectures there could be
some performance differences between the
cards so we thought it was best to test
with both due to time and resource
constraints we weren't able to also add
in budget or mid-range cards like the
gtx 1060 or rx 580 if you would like to
see those in future videos of this kind
consider supporting us on patreon so we
can allocate a bit more time to test
other sets of graphics cards in any case
I'll be commenting throughout the video
on well lower end cards might stumble
but for the most part these results
should hold true for less powerful GPUs
provided you're still GPU limited like
we are in this video final thing to note
all the in-game captures
you see here were taken at 4k with the
r-tx 20 ATT I Vegas 64 struggles to play
this game at 4k with the highest quality
settings so for Vega we benchmark the
settings at 1440p other than that
everything else was kept the same and
the latest optimized drivers for both
cards were used also note that the
in-game benchmark was used for all
performance testing the captures you see
are only to show the visual differences
that's not where we tested those exact
settings actually one last additional
thing to spot some of the quality
differences we're talking about we
recommend watching this video at
YouTube's maximum 4k quality setting and
setting the video to full screen on
decent sized display and there would be
any zooming pausing or slowing down the
footage we captured if you can only spot
the differences zooming in the footage
you're probably not going to notice
during regular gameplay so let's start
with the simplest comparison the in-game
presets there are 5 presets in total
ranging from lowest to highest and
anti-aliasing is independent of this
presets for all our testing we used SMA
82 X's it provided the best visual
quality without a ridiculous performance
penalty though we'll cover AAA in a bit
more detail later from a quick
inspection there appears to be very
little quality difference between the
highest and high presets there's a
slight change to shaving and a small
reduction in texture quality and detail
but it's pretty hard to spot the
differences medium drops the level of
detail a bit further and in comparison
to high you can start to see the
differences with harsha's and less
geometry low strips back thing is pretty
noticeably compared to the higher
settings while the lowest preset looks
pretty terrible with basically all
lighting effects completely stripped out
in terms of performance it's a surprise
to see such a large difference between
the high and highest presets you can
expect to see 22% more performance with
Vega and 26% more with the 2080 ti
simply by turning down one preset with a
small impact to the visual quality
perhaps even more surprising is you
don't gain that much more performance
dropping from high to medium despite a
more noticeable drop in visual quality
and then of course at the lower end you
gain a fair bit of performance playing
on low for a large drop in quality I'd
only use the lowest preset if you're
running on an absolute potato judging by
what we're seeing here if
don't want to mess around with anything
but the presets my advice is to play the
game on high if your hardware is capable
if you're running into resource limits
for example your car's memory is being
exceeded dropping into medium would be a
good choice as it reduces texture and
geometry load and you might see a larger
performance improvement than we showed
here with the high-end carts but those
with high-end cards they really
shouldn't be playing on medium as it
doesn't improve performance all that
much when you have a large GPU with
plenty of VRAM there are some settings
you can raise higher than the highest
preset which I guess doesn't make a lot
of sense considering the preset is
called highest anyway you can turn up
texture filtering shadow quality level
of detail and screen space contact
shadows up another notch doing this
shows off a few frames per second but
does it improve quality in a noticeable
way so it recommends sticking to the
highest preset or even better just using
high as we just talked about
anti-aliasing is the next thing to look
at as it's independent of the presets
the level of AAA you should use does
depend on the resolution of your display
and typically you won't need as much AAA
at 4k compared to 1080p for a nice sharp
clean image this footage once captured
at 4k and it can be a bit hard to spot
the differences but I play through a lot
of the game at 1440p so I have some
additional thoughts on AAA based on that
experience shadow of the tomb Raider's
graphics menu recommends you play the
game with taa enabled or temporal
anti-aliasing I'm normally a bit
hesitant of that as I've seen plenty of
taa implementations that are no better
than a blur filter but shadow of the
Tomb Raider uses decent taa and for the
most part I think it provides a quality
upgrade on SMA a particularly around
fine detail like Lara's hair moving up
to SMA 82x sharpens up the image a bit
more compared to taa without introducing
the artifacts present in SMA it's hard
to spawn at 4k but 1440p textures worth
that bit sharper with SMA 82x of course
we also have SMA a 4x providing the best
quality anti-aliasing but it's only a
small improvement over SMA 82 X in my
opinion especially at 4k and in terms of
performance well don't bother using SMA
a 4x is it's the most performance
demanding setting in the entire game and
the quality improvement you'd get is
minimal switching from SMA 82 X down to
ta
does improve performance by two to three
percent I'd probably recommend doing
that at 4k but with lower resolutions
SMA 82x does provide a sharp
presentation which I feel is worth it
for the small performance here also
interesting to note that disabling AAA
on the RT x28 ETI noticeably improves
performance whereas there is no
difference in performance between the
first three anti-aliasing modes on Vegas
64 not only recommend playing with
anti-aliasing disabled at this point if
you don't want to do any further
tweaking I'd recommend playing the game
using the high preset with SMA 82 X or
taa depending on your resolution now
let's look at individual settings from
top to bottom and see if we can optimize
things a bit further
starting with textures typically this is
the setting you only need to adjust if
you're running out of VRAM which won't
be an issue with either Vegas 64 or the
RT X 20 atti
but might be an issue with more
entry-level cards visually there's a
slight difference to the clarity of
textures between high and ultra 4k
though I'd be surprised if you could
tell the difference at lower resolutions
there is some quality loss going back
down to normal visible in the fur on the
back of Lara as well as the cloth and
wood in the background the largest
change is moving from normal to low
textures low is very blurry with a lack
of pronounced detail while normal is
actually respectable in any case when we
look at the performance data there's
barely any difference between normal and
ultra on the r-tx 20 atti while with
vaguer 1% lows are impacted slightly for
Vega a probably recommend using high
textures due to the 3 percent
improvement to 1 percent low performance
especially if you are playing at 1440p
or lower for the 2080 tôi có túi' ultra
and don't look back texture filtering is
an interesting one because it's set to
just 8 X when using the highest preset
and then just 4 X when using the high
preset visually there's a subtle
difference between the maximum 16 X and
lowest 2x and isotropic modes but
distant and off-angle textures are
noticeably clearer when using 16x
compared to 2x bilinear is the most
basic mode which reduces quality
slightly compared to 2x as you can see
looking at the performance data there's
only a small difference in performance
between 16 x anisotropic and bilinear
filtering especially on Vegas 64 6
tnx does allowed textures to shine in
all their glory so my recommendation
here is to crank it to 16x the setting
is really only important in very
resource constrained cards higher and
GPU should have no real issues with 16x
which is why it's a bit bizarre that 4x
is the default for the high preset in a
lot of games shadow quality is the
setting that has the largest impact on
performance however with shadow of the
Tomb Raider there's not a massive
difference between the quality of the
various shadow settings maybe the name
of the game has something to do with
that changing this setting affects the
softness of shadow edges with ultra
providing the softest and most natural
results and low giving a sharp shadow
presentation Ultra is marginally better
than high but I honestly couldn't tell
the difference between high and normal
going from normal to low is the largest
quality difference well except for
turning us off entirely which
significantly affects the presentation
in fact turning shadows off makes the
game of 10 years older it's pretty
remarkable how crucial that simple
lighting effect is to more realistic
visuals in terms of performance you
again about 4% from downgrading shadows
from ultra to normal which I feel is a
good trade-off considering the very
minor visual difference switching from
normal to low has a small impact on the
r-tx 20/80 tier and a slightly larger
impact with Vega but the sharp shadow
presentation is noticeably inferior for
only a small performance improvement so
normal is the best balance between
visual quality and frame rate ambient
occlusion is one of the most crucial
settings to optimize in terms of visual
quality and performance shadow of the
Tomb Raider includes three modes off bTW
AO which is a DOS Montreal's custom AO
technique and HB AO plus an NVIDIA AO
method that works on both Nvidia and AMD
cards one of those very few features
developed by Nvidia that actually works
on the red team there's quite a
noticeable difference between all three
modes with each step providing more
depth to the image more subtle shadowing
and just a better image in general HBO
Plus is the winner here but bTW AO is a
large step up from having no ambient
occlusion looking at the performance
data it's clear that BT AO is the best
ao method to use from a performance
perspective on the RT X 20 atti enabling
BT air only comes with a small
performance hit compared to No
on Vega 64 the hit is slightly larger
but it's still manageable it's when you
enable H Bao plus that performance drops
a fair bit and surprisingly it's the 20
atti that's hit the highest despite HB
arrow plus being an Nvidia developed AO
technique for most gamers I think bTW AO
gives the best balance of performance
and visual quality but considering HB
arrow plus is a noticeable step up those
with higher end cards might like to
enable the setting if they're already
getting decent performance unlike some
top-end settings that do barely anything
for visual quality you can at least tell
when HBO plus is on depth of field is
one of the more contentious settings
some people love it some hate it the
normal setting applies a background blur
in some circumstances it's quite a good
blur implementation to pushing it up to
high enables a foreground blur in some
areas as well depending on the scene as
this is a personal preference thing I'll
leave it up to you to decide which
setting you'd like to use personally I
like tip the field so I'll put it on
high when I'm gaming the performance
difference between high and normal is
noticeable but only a few percent and
that only comes into play for the few
times foreground depth of field is
utilized in general gameplay the
difference between normal and off is
pretty minimal looking at the level of
detail modes it's clear why the game
uses the high mode for the highest
preset rather than ultra there's
essentially no difference the normal low
and lowest modes or reduced geometry
detail and detail draw distance slightly
with each step and I think the
differences between each of those modes
are noticeable enough that you should
try to use high where your hardware
allows in terms of performance you can
gain up to 3 percent on Vegas 64
switching from ultra to high for
basically no quality difference and on
both cars there are small gains to be
had for each subsequent reduction in
level of detail considering high does
provide better quality than normal again
my advice is to use the high preset
where possible tessellation this is an
easy one enabling the setting provides
more depth to geometry particularly the
rough ground Lara is often walking over
it's a noticeable change and one that
doesn't come at a large performance cost
from either the r-tx 20 atti
or vega 64 so I'd recommend leaving it
enabled bloom is a subtle effect that's
most noticeable in the darker or night
scenes in the game it provides a subtle
glow around light sources that in my pen
does improve image quality though I know
there are some that will turn off this
effect immediately
disabling the effect gives you about a
two percent performance improvement if
you're interested motion blur is the
most controversial of all graphic
settings with most people preferring to
disable it I actually think the motion
blur implementation in shadow of the
Tomb Raider is excellent especially
compared to a lot of other games I
reckon you might want to at least try
turning it on to see what you make of it
in any case when it comes to performance
it's one of the first settings I disable
as turning off motion blur improves
performance by 5% which isn't a surprise
considering the high quality
implementation screen space reflections
are important for realistic reflections
and lighting in the game particularly
when it comes to the large expanses of
water in various environments there is a
large visual quality difference between
having SSR on or off with on providing a
more realistic reflection system than
there are still reflections when SSR is
disabled you can see here the water
looking a lot flatter with SSR off so
I'd keep it enabled if you have the GPU
power in terms of the performance hit
turning off SSR will give you a 4%
improvement to framerate so it's one of
the more expensive effects but one I
think adds a lot to the presentation
screen space contact shadows are a bit
of an enigma I spent ages poring over
footage of the game to spot the
difference this shadowing technique
makes because disabling them improves
performance by up to nine percent but
most of the time I literally could not
tell the difference whatsoever and in
the places I did spot the changes the
effects of contact shadows were so minor
that I'd rather just turn it off and
gain an extra three to five FPS and for
the difference between the high and
normal modes I have no idea what the
difference is pure hair is enabled at
all times in shadow of the tomb Raider's
so you get a nice physics based hair
simulation regardless of whether you set
it too low or normal upgrading to normal
increases the amount of strands being
simulated and the overall density of
Lara's hair which to me looks more
natural than the low setting there is a
small performance at when making that
change and depending on how much you
care about Lara's hair you might
consider turning it down to low for a 2%
performance improvement final setting
we're looking at today is volumetric
lighting as you can see from the
comparison this has a pretty significant
impact on how the game looks
turning the setting off results in
flatter and less impressive lighting
while turning it on is the default for
all but the lowest preset and that makes
sense because there is basically no
performance difference between having it
on or off the last two seconds you see
in the menu are the lens flares and
screen effects both are optional
cosmetic things that have no impact on
performance so now you've seen how every
setting in the game performs and the
visual quality differences between them
I think the high preset is a really good
starting point but with a few small
tweaks you can get nearly the same
visual quality as the highest preset but
with around 30% more performance
performance will also be around 4%
better than the high preset for
essentially identical visual quality and
overall these settings you're seeing
here provide a great balance of visual
quality and performance and of course if
you have weaker hardware you can
individually tweak a few settings as
shown earlier to improve your frame rate
so that just about does it for our
shadow of the two meta graphics setting
guide and performance evaluation I'm
sure you've seen enough of Lara Croft's
ass checks for one video I've been
playing a fair bit of the game myself
it's an absolutely stunning game
graphically particularly if you have the
hardware to run it at 60fps or above at
a decent resolution so I reckon we'll be
benchmarking it for quite some time
especially as the top quality settings
are very demanding obviously as it
stands right now neither ray-tracing
nor dl SS are available in the game for
NVIDIA RT x owners though both features
should be coming in a future update so a
retest the game when those features are
available that's it for now if you like
this video give it a thumbs up consider
supporting us on patreon to get access
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know what other games you'd like to see
get this treatment in the comment
section below I'll catch you next time
you
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