Rise of the Tomb Raider

I would expect this to be mostly useful for low-CPU setups. Still the "higher lows" on the two more complex scenes seems consistent on my config (3770k at stock). I mean, min 14 on DX11 vs min 60 on DX12 in the Geothermal Valley section. Would be nice to have frame counts to be able to tell how significant that is.

I'll probably play with DX12 for the heck of it.
 
Well crap, I finished the game about ten minutes before this patch was released. Oh well I will try it out to see what gains I see. Was there ever any talk of this being DX 12 before?
 
Well crap, I finished the game about ten minutes before this patch was released. Oh well I will try it out to see what gains I see. Was there ever any talk of this being DX 12 before?

Yep. Prior to the release of the PC version, they said they might do a DX12 update.
 
VXAO is DX11 exclusive, and you need an updated patch 5 (build 638.8) which was just released for it to work at all.
 
Quick and dirty run of the benchmark on my 980 (the 980 Ti is in for repairs).

DX11 at 1920x1200 57.82 fps
DX12 at 1920x1200 49.21 fps

upload_2016-3-12_7-42-21.png


Looks like it ain't so hot in Nvidia land, would like to see some AMD results.
 
so VXAO only works in DX11...that's strange...why would the most advanced AO method not be available in DX12?...I want to try VXAO out later tonight and see if it makes any noticeable impact in terms of image quality or performance
 
I get basically zero performance increase on 980Ti SLI, and in some places it's actually worse. Drops ~5 FPS consistently DX12 vs DX11 in the built-in bench. Did no one test this before they pushed it out?


EDIT: Just read above that SLI isn't supported yet in DX12, which just confirms that I'm getting abysmal scaling (if any) in DX11. Wonderful. I like this game, but performance-wise it's a massive disappointment. Nvidia needs to get their shit together and get this working properly, I didn't pay $1300 for GPUs to be consistently let down.

EDIT2: Always forget that SLI is disabled when you install new drivers, since it makes no sense at all. Re-enabled it and I'm seeing ~30 frames higher (from average 45 over all to average 77 over all) so not good scaling, but not terrible. Going to re-enable DX12 and see if it's any different or if it's true as another poster here said and SLI isn't available yet.

EDIT3: Yep, zero scaling in DX12 mode, 48FPS average.
 
Last edited:
Well crap, I finished the game about ten minutes before this patch was released. Oh well I will try it out to see what gains I see. Was there ever any talk of this being DX 12 before?
Lol it was talked about the game having DX12 even before release. There were plenty of articles from every major site including Microsoft showing that the game would be in DX12 at some point. I am not sure how you could know about this game yet not have a clue about DX12 being associated with it.
 
DX12 looks underwhelming so far...I guess I'll be keeping Windows 7 for the foreseeable future...the true DX12 test will likely come from games built from the ground up using DX12...
 
Didn't see any noticeable performance increase here, GTX 970 on a 6700k. Hopefully DX12 has more to offer in the future.
 
Yeah, so... you have basically an ideal system to test this, they're claiming 33% performance improvement and you're seeing nothing. Either they're flat out lying or using unreleased drivers or something.
 
Yeah, so... you have basically an ideal system to test this, they're claiming 33% performance improvement and you're seeing nothing. Either they're flat out lying or using unreleased drivers or something.

Always take claims of improvements with a mountain of salt. Those numbers are under ideal conditions, at specific points in a benchmark, with specific hardware.
 
The benchmark runs worse in DX12 in my case. However, CPU bound situations in actual game could still run better.
 
5H6DmEL.jpg


d77vT8F.jpg


pUEJKGD.jpg


I gained almost 10 FPS on the overall score. If you guys are having trouble with DX12 and are selecting DX12 within the game, you have to restart the game to get DX12 working.

Edit: In the screen Vsync is on. Obviously that was turned off for the Benchmark.
 
That benchmark just loads the GPU as there is no AI going on, no loading of assets as you walk around, lots of other variables. I tried it and while the on screen fps didn't look much different it felt a lot worse. Meanwhile benchmark has me at 60 with a high in the 80s.
 
anyone have any HBAO+ vs VXAO benchmarks?...I looked at some screenshots and some people swear there's this major difference...I see a slight visual upgrade in darker scenes
 
anyone have any HBAO+ vs VXAO benchmarks?...I looked at some screenshots and some people swear there's this major difference...I see a slight visual upgrade in darker scenes

Onyxia is deep breathing more ... no, really.

Just having fun with ya. See if you catch the reference. :)

But seriously stuff like that you should only notice in still shots. If you notice it otherwise then usually it's broken.
 
So I think the problem is the GPU memory management under DX12. It would seem push up again your GPU memory ceiling has a much more significant impact under DX12 vs DX11. By dropping the texture resolution to high on my 980.

DX12

upload_2016-3-13_9-4-41.png


DX11

upload_2016-3-13_9-5-15.png


The minor loss in top end frame rate I would attribute to the fact that there are game specific optimizations for the DX11 pipeline in the Nvidia drivers and nothing similar in place for the DX12. Still over all the DX12 version is a much smoother and more consistent experience. Additionally bringing the memory usage into line fixed the shadow flickering I was seeing in DX12.
 
So I think the problem is the GPU memory management under DX12. It would seem push up again your GPU memory ceiling has a much more significant impact under DX12 vs DX11. By dropping the texture resolution to high on my 980.

DX12

DX11


The minor loss in top end frame rate I would attribute to the fact that there are game specific optimizations for the DX11 pipeline in the Nvidia drivers and nothing similar in place for the DX12. Still over all the DX12 version is a much smoother and more consistent experience. Additionally bringing the memory usage into line fixed the shadow flickering I was seeing in DX12.
In my case dropping the texture quality to high didn't make any difference. DX11 was still faster. In your case it looks like your DX11 result was capped at 60 fps (did you have v-sync on?).
 
In my case dropping the texture quality to high didn't make any difference. DX11 was still faster. In your case it looks like your DX11 result was capped at 60 fps (did you have v-sync on?).

He hit 80 and 90 frames. It wasn't capped.
 
I'm not sure if I trust the min and max values because it shows way higher numbers than 75 even though vsync is enabled (75Hz screen).

Game seems to have some problems with handling sync depending on the screen mode. Toggled in and out of full screen and ran another DX11 bench

upload_2016-3-13_11-57-38.png


DX12 does still seem to come out on average a little higher. I've noticed that running in exclusive full screen in DX12 can result in some odd frame rate behavior. Case in point.

Exclusive Full Screen DX12

upload_2016-3-13_12-1-3.png


Full Screen Windowed DX12

upload_2016-3-13_12-1-28.png


Dunno what that's about.
 
FWIW I upped my options for the above tests, still at 1920x1080.

upload_2016-3-13_12-5-14.png
 
Shouldn't be required...I find that for some reason G-Sync doesn't always work right with windowed fullscreen, not sure if that is G-Sync alone, or with SLI, or what.

I think DX12 just has some problems so far...early implementations and all that. Doesn't seem to work right with SLI and even with "multi GPU" the utilization is far less than SLI.
 
"For Rise of the Tomb Raider the largest gain DirectX 12 will give us is the ability to spread our CPU rendering work over all CPU cores, without introducing additional overhead. This is especially important on 8-core CPUs like Intel i7’s or many AMD FX processors."
Dev Blog: Bringing DirectX 12 to Rise of the Tomb... | Tomb Raider Blog



Well so much for DX12 utilizing more cpu power and taking advantage of more threads. I just tested DX12 at 1280x720 and it got 160 fps without HT and 153 fps with HT.

So the more cpu intensive I make it, the more having HT hurts performance in this game. The DX12 implementation is NOT taking advantage of more than 4 cores on an Intel i7 and is only hurting performance compared to having HT off.
 
Last edited:
I ran some tests yesterday

GTX 970, 1080p

DX11 -
49.97

DX12 -
42.82 (with exclusive full screen)
49.28 (without exclusive full screen)

Just updated my drivers to 364.51

DX12 - 74.97 (!!!)

I haven't tested DX11 yet, but holy shit.....I had to double check that my game settings are the same, and yup they are. Shame I'm done playing the main story. I ended up playing through on a pad simply because the game felt like crap on a mouse to me under 45fps. I may just pick up the dlc now though!

Edit:

DX11 - 77.73

So, DX11 still faster on my rig. But damn, GJ nvidia
 
Last edited:
Can someone help me, I just bought the game through Steam and it shows the version being the newest v1.0 Build 647.2 but DX12 is greyed out and won't let me select it. Is it only a Windows 10 feature?
 
Rise of the Tomb Raider patch adds DX12 multi-GPU support

A new patch for Rise of the Tomb Raider has just been released which adds DX12 multi-GPU support for both NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFireX...the full list of changes are as follows:
  • Adds DirectX12 Multi-GPU support. Many of you have requested this, so DirectX 12 now supports NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFireX configurations.
  • The benefits of DirectX 12 are still the same, but now you are less likely to be GPU bottlenecked and can reach higher framerates due to the improved CPU utilization DirectX 12 offers.
  • Adds utilization of DirectX 12 Asynchronous Compute, on AMD GCN 1.1 GPUs and NVIDIA Pascal-based GPUs, for improved GPU performance.
  • On the latest Windows 10 version, V-sync can now be disabled (Windows Store version), and behavior of disabled V-sync has been improved (Steam version).
  • Improvements to stereoscopic 3D rendering, including fixes for NIVIDA Surround and AMD Eyefinity in combination with stereoscopic 3D.
  • Improved default settings for certain integrated GPUs.
  • Removes the Voidhammer Shotgun for users that do not have Cold Darkness Awakens DLC or have not yet unlocked it by rescuing prisoners in Cold Darkness Awakens.
  • A fix for a save issue where some game state could get lost in very rare circumstances.
  • This patch force-disables the Steam Overlay when using DirectX 12. This is due to stability issues with the Steam Overlay in combination with DirectX 12. (You can re-enable with the -enablesteamoverlay launch argument)
  • A fix for crashes with VXAO enabled on NVIDIA GTX1080 cards.
  • A variety of other smaller optimizations, bug-fixes, and tweaks.
 
I still need to pick this one up, but I haven't seen it hit a price point I'm comfortable with yet.
 
Back
Top