Conclusion

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a worthy successor to this epic series. The game feels right, provides immersive gameplay, and comes with amazing graphics that run well on both AMD and NVIDIA cards.

For 1080p gaming, a R9 290X/390X or GTX 970 are good options, but you can reduce details on weaker cards - the range of settings is large enough. For 1440p, I'd recommend a GTX 980 Ti or R9 Fury/X, and 4K is left to SLI setups only. Unfortunately, the game does not support CrossFire at this time, which will probably be fixed in a future AMD driver update.

NVIDIA released an optimized driver for the game a couple days ago, but as per usual, we haven't heard a peep out of AMD. Even though the game runs great on AMD's latest 16.1 driver from earlier this month, I wish AMD would follow NVIDIA's practice of releasing an updated driver before a new big game comes out. This would give users the assurance that their rig will be ready for the game while telling them that AMD cares about them.

Memory usage of the game is high - when lots of memory is available. On cards with less memory, the game will happily use what is available without any noticeable effects on its framerate, at least until you get down to the 2 GB VRAM cards, which really shouldn't run 4K anyway.