Conclusion

RTX tech in Shadow of the Tomb Raider being a little bit late significantly impacts the title because most people have probably already finished the game or are not interested in it at all. On the other hand, if the game goes on sale soon, there's a chance a wider audience gets to check out these new features.

First and foremost is RTX raytracing, which improves the quality and realism of shadows in SOTTR. Looking at our comparison screenshots, I can definitely spot differences, and the shadows look more real, especially the soft shadows look amazing. However, given the game makes great use of shadow maps already (when RTX is off), the increase in quality ends up looking more like an additional shadow quality setting instead of a game-transforming experience. Still, RTX shadows are a great vehicle for developers to get their feet wet with RTX and to experiment without making huge code changes. The next step forward would be doing not only shadows, but rendering all lighting with RTX, which can yield amazing results, as we've seen in yesterday's GTC presentation.

Performance cost of RTX raytracing is comparable to other titles and in the 30-50% range depending on the actual scene, which is definitely not negligible. Also, the game has a few bugs related to settings, and the performance difference between "RTX High" and "RTX Ultra" is almost non-existent. This is similar to what we've seen in Battlefield V's first version of RTX raytracing and suggests that Eidos still has some optimizing to do. In Battlefield, developer DICE was able to gradually reduce the RTX performance hit over several patches (NVIDIA's developer relations helped a lot here). Given how important RTX is to NVIDIA, I have no doubts we'll see the same happen in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. As mentioned before, I'd consider this more of a test run for future titles and to introduce developers to the tech, so they can create great things in their next game—the learned knowledge won't be lost.

DLSS, on the other hand, does very well in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. We see around 35% performance gained at 4K, which is quite significant and nearly offsets the performance hit from RTX. Image quality seems very decent. I am not sure if this due to good DLSS training data or because the art style of Shadow of the Tomb Raider tends to work better with DLSS. Of course, if you look at individual pixels and do side-by-side image comparisons, you'll always be able to make out areas where DLSS looks blurry. Personally, I find DLSS-on vs. DLSS-off really hard to tell apart, which made organizing my screenshots a bit difficult because the differences are small. Just like in previous versions of the tech, you are free to turn on either DLSS or RTX, or both, as suits your taste and performance requirements.

Yesterday, NVIDIA announced that they are bringing RTX raytracing support to their Pascal lineup, too, with much lower performance, of course. Still, this gives developers a nice incentive to add raytracing to their games and also focus on its performance cost, which will only help us, the gamers. It's also a nice way for owners of Pascal-generation cards to see the RTX effects for themselves, live in action, which will definitely let them make more informed buying decisions.