RTX On, But at What Cost?
Accessing ray tracing in Shadow of the Tomb Raider is quite easy.
The game provides a decent description of what each mode does.
All testing was done on aCore i9-9900Krig, with game footage captured using theRTX 2080 Tiat 4K.
So this would be a light from a fire or lamp, for example.
Where you start to notice a difference is with the High and Ultra modes.
One thing is clear though: the High shadow mode is not good.
To us it looks worse than non ray traced shadow due to a lack of shadow density.
Ray traced shadows have a number of other advantages.
Again, without ray tracing the scene still looks excellent but ray tracing steps it up a notch.
Looking at the high ray tracing mode again, there is a serious shadow draw distance issue.
They just pop in out of thin air in the distance.
Then there are some instances where ray traced shadows don’t work correctly.
We spotted some other artifacting in the game with ray tracing, again on roofing.
But ray tracing also introduces these weird patterns into the roof that don’t look right.
The ultra mode has its glitches, but it looks better than ray tracing disabled and definitely more accurate.
And in most cases it’s not a subtle change, it’s a decent upgrade.
We’ll start with theRTX 2080 Tiresults.
Across all three resolutions, the hit moving from Off to Ultra is significant.
Then at both 1440p and 4K you’re getting a 41% drop on average.
At this resolution you’ll want an adaptive sync monitor.
Ray tracing in Shadow of the Tomb Raider once again comes at a big cost in performance.
It’s a big hit, but we’re not in console performance territory.
With other combinations we’re looking at performance near 30 FPS at times.
We would opt for the former every single time.
On one hand, the visual upgrade is decent and the game can look great using the Ultra mode.
That’s probably one or two GPU generations down the line.
For now, think of ray tracing as a bonus for owners of RTX graphics cards.
