Rise of the Tomb Raider - Graphics Optimization and Performance Guide - Tweak Tutorial - GTX 970

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The Doctor & The Wizard

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Published on February 16, 2016 2:01:07 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od9WGYYhuvI

Game:

Rise of the Tomb Raider (2015)

Category:

Guide

Duration: 10:54

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Welcome to Rise of the Tomb Raider - let's get into the graphics options and what we can tweak to optimize our graphic performance.

Check out Reshade - https://reshade.me

Recommended Specs of Tomb Raider
- OS: Windows 10 64 bit
- Processor: Intel Core i7-3770K
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 980Ti 2560x1440 or NVIDIA GTX 970 1920x1080
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 25 GB available space

My Specs
Win 10 64
intel i7-4790k
8 GB RAM
GTX 970
250 GB SSD

Ambient Occlusion - HBAO vs BTAO vs off
HBAO+ looks a lot better than the other options, and because the performance hit isn't absolutely huge it's worth leaving on if you have a 970 or above in my opinion. You can get a few extra fps by dropping to "On" - and a few more still by turning off completely.

Anisotropic Filtering - Negligible performance cost and significantly improves texture rendering at weird angles or at a distance. If you're going to have it on anything other than trilinear (the lowest), set it to 16x as the difference between 2x and 16x is maybe only 1-2 fps.

Anti-Aliasing - AA is resource heavy (except for FXAA) and you can get a lot of bang for your buck here. However, I've read online that Jaggies can cause heart attacks so please be careful. If you want to get some pretty good anti aliasing with some decent performance, I recommend trying out ReShade - it's an injectable AA solution that adds post processing to the game but it doesn't blur the textures like FXAA does. Upping the AA to SSAA 2x or 4x will crush your FPS, so just be aware of that. You can download reshade here http://reshade.me/ - and instructions to set it up should be in the readme

Depth of Field: Some people don't like depth of field in their games and you can certainly turn it off. If you want it on - consider using the On setting to save a few FPS. Very High will introduce less blur for a more realistic and cinematic look, at the cost of fps. personally I find the On setting to suffice here.

Dynamic Foliage - This setting is pretty crucial to the look of the game In my opinion. It has a fairly significant FPS impact, but on low the game looks totally difference when you're out in the wilderness. I absolutely recommend trying to keep this on medium to high, but if you're in dire need of performance you can drop this sucker to low.

Film Grain: Stylistic choice. No noticeable performance impact.

Level of Detail - this adjusts the quality and visibility of objects at medium to long ranges. It also does the same with Shadows and lighting. You aren't going to see huge gains from turning this to low - so I recommend trying to leave it on medium or high. Very high looks great for the big expansive areas - but is a little bit overkill in my opinion.

PureHair - This basically renders the hair in the game as separate strands and applies physics to each strand. The On setting disperses individually rendered hairs with a mix of non individual hairs - but the performance difference between Very High and On is not huge. However - having this setting on any setting other than Off will significantly reduce FPS. Depending on the camera angle and the specific scene - this setting alone can cost you upwards of 15-20 fps (usually during cinematics and closeups). During gameplay it will only cost 5-10 fps - but that's still pretty significant.
Screen Space Reflections - This is the reflections on the water and other shiny objects in the game. On looks really good - off can make the reflective surfaces look extra flat, but you can save a few fps by disabling this.

Specular Reflection Quality - personally I didn't see the increase in sharpness of reflections to be worth the fps loss. Recommend leaving this at Normal.

Shadow Quality - This setting has a huge fps footprint and greatly changes the fidelity. the High setting should give you nice shadows in the vast majority of circumstances, but you can save quite a bit of performance by dropping to medium. However on Medium the shadows do look quite blurry. The off setting looks absolutely strange - and is only recommended if you absolutely need performance.

tessellation - costs around 4 fps on 900 series cards due to the changes in the way nvidia cards process tessellation tasks. If you have any other series of video card this will cost much more fps and may need to be disabled.

Texture Quality - You'll need tons of video ram to ramp this up to very high. Those with 4 GB cards will need to be on high. The game reportedly can use up to 10 GB on very high during a prolonged game session - you'll need at minimum 6 GB to run this on very high without seeing stuttering from texture swaps

Summary: On max - Rise of the Tomb Raider is crazy demanding on your system. You can get very close to constant 60 FPS on all max settings (but with AA reduced to FXAA), but you'll need to be running 970's in SLI or above. A single 980 ti or titan x cannot achieve the 60 fps consistently on max.

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Thanks!

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