DirectX 11: graphics card performance Full HD & WHQD
For proper gameplay we feel 40 FPS on average is a comfortable region teo be in. So keep thus thumb of rule in mind, an average 40 FPS should the threshold you aim for, while 60 FPS (frames per second) or higher can be considered optimal. This goes for FPS gaming. However with RTS gaming things are a bit different, in such a title gaming as low as the 30~35 FPS range is fine. Gaming below 30 FPS is consider to be poor.
At all times if your framerate is low, you can forfeit on image quality settings which will enable higher framerates. For example you could lower your anti-aliasing mode or even disable it. It's the small GPU intensive tweaks herein that will allow you to balance out performance versus image quality settings. For example if we test at Ultra High quality settings at 8xAA we'd drop down to 2xAA. Such an offer increases performance while you probably don't need AA in Ultra HD anyway. Above the most popular used monitor resolution, 1920x1080 pixels also known as Full HD. Lots of monitors also are a little deeper at 1920x1200, for ease of use we'll consider that as Full HD as performance will remain very close. We do recommend 1920x1200 monitors for gaming though, it adds that hint more detail. In our testing with Rise of the Tomb Raider any card starting at the GeForce GTX 770 or Radeon R9 280/285 series really is fast enough for the rendering engine at proper high or very high image quality settings. AMD cards suffer from API overhead in 1080P, something that will pick up for the better in higher resolutions.
The game is VERY WEIRD in the sense that in gameplay scenes your FPS can be 30 on average and then when you look to the right all of the sudden it jumps up to 65 FPS. This happens throughout the game, we'll focus a bit more on the stringent segments in-game and that reflects and results into somewhat lower average FPS.
What you will notice with the game is that the actual framerate performance can differ per scene rapidly and fast, hence the shown average FPS results are an indication to follow. For the more hardcore PC gamers a preferred resolution is QHD or also called WQHD which is short for Wide Quad HD. it is a native resolution of 2560x1440 pixels and a very popular panel type for gamers. Let's just call this the more more swanky resolution opposed to Full HD. Again, all tests are run in Very High quality settings. Starting at a GeForce GTX 970 or an AMD Radeon R9 290 you can already game in 2560x1440 if you wanted too with these quality settings. Interesting to see is the strong lead for the GTX 980 Ti over the Fury X, I honestly did not see that one coming.
