Gadgetory

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 to our exclusive discord chat and let us know what other games you'd like to see get this treatment in the comment section below I'll catch you next time you