Shadow of the Tomb Raider: RTX and DLSS Update - DirectX 12 (DXR) - RTX and DLSS Update

DirectX 12 (DXR) - RTX and DLSS Update

It's a little late to the party, but better fashionably late than never at all. Nixxes has been optimizing Shadow of the Tomb Raider and today (Match 19th 2019) a new patch is out that finally brings Raytracing (RTX) and DLSS towards Shadow of the Tomb Raider. For all RTX enablement you are going to need Window 10 update 1809 or higher, Nvidia’s RTX 20- series GPU and Nvidia’s latest drivers 419.35 or newer. The game will auto-update itself with the patch. 

• Nvidia’s Ray-Traced Shadows
• Support for DLSS.

• Window 10 update 1809 or higher
• Nvidia’s RTX 20- series GPU
• Nvidia’s latest drivers 419.35 and up.

DLSS

Right, let's get started with some numbers and image quality results. First off, DLSS, NVIDIA is now offering the AA solution in-game as an option. Quite honestly, it looks pretty good, a tiny bit blurry in certain areas but overall, you can trade in TAA for DLSS and see a nice gain in performance.

DLSS only works for selected resolutions, 2560x1440 and 3840x2160

Above you can see the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti in game you can now enable DLSS. Mind you DLSS is not working at Full HD. Ergo throughout the RTX and DLSS results, we'll stick to the supported 2560x1440 (Wide Quad HD) and 3840x2160  (Ultra HD) resolution.

Overall swapping your AA towards DLSS on a compatible RTX card will bring you an extra 10 to 35% extra performance, the more GPU limited you are (higher resolution) the better your gain will become. 

RTX - Raytracing

Also in the game options, you will now find RTX options, raytracing in-game can be selected as off, medium, high and ultra. It needs to be stated that if you aim for Raytracing, only High and Ultra are interesting. You'll be in for a surprise though, little is actually raytraced, as far as we can detect, only shadows are now properly raytraced.

Your RTX options will be off, medium, high and ultra

Whether or not you find that work the performance drop, of course, is up to you. Please have a look at the following chart:

Above a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti at a Quad HD monitor resolution.  I included a variety of settings here, DLSS on/off as well as the three additional RTX modes. We assume you want the performance benefit of DLSS to trade in for RTX Ultra mode, and as you can see that yields into a 74 FPS framerate (average).

Once we move towards Ultra HD, we can see that the DLSS + RTX Ultra performance effect is much smaller. This is an indication that RTX does not have enough RT cores to keep up with the shader engine (which likes to go faster but is being held back by the RT cores much like what a CPU bottleneck does in a lower resolution opposed towards a high resolution).

Overall though with DLSS on and RTX Ultra you're looking at a comfortable 50 something FPS.

Image comparison DLSS

Let's have a look at DLSS on and OFF.

In the above comparison, you can see a tiny bit of blur for DLSS if you look at the backpack. Mind you these comparisons are using uncompressed Ultra HD PNG files, two of them and each roughly 12 MB (to load).

Image comparison RTX

Let's have a look at RTX ON and OFF.

The above comparison shows RTX off versus RTX Ultra, we left DLSS on as we assume you will do that as well. You can see the effect of Raytraced shadows here, in specific look how the shadow of Lara is looking. So what you need to understand is that it is no longer an 'estimated' shadow, but rather a real-world shadow. Also if you look at the shadows on the people on the left (upper body), there's just so much more realism/detail in there.

In the second example, raytraced shadow differences are a bit more har to spot. But RTX on does delivers more precise and softer shadows casting of off Lara onto the mountain wall.  Fair=fair, in the game that's all RTX is doing though, shadows. So how important you find that it only for you to decide. The DLSS combo with RTX does work well for the game. 

On the next page, some charts showing the perf relative towards normal shading.