Introduction

The first major post-Holiday game release, Rise of the Tomb Raider is the second installment to the 2013 franchise reboot by Crystal Dynamics under Square Enix. While it may retain most of the production design and game mechanics from its smash-hit predecessor - besides its content - much of its presentation has been improved.

Interestingly, while the 2013 Tomb Raider game went under the AMD Game banner and was even part of game bundles with AMD Radeon graphics cards, Rise of the Tomb Raider features NVIDIA's GameWorks varnish and is part of NVIDIA's "Discover the Legend Within" game bundle. Think of GameWorks as a set of game-specific visual effects and features that only run on NVIDIA GeForce GPUs.

Rise of the Tomb Raider sees our protagonist Lara Croft trot the globe to find answers that lead up to the lost city of Kitezh, a trail that cost her father his sanity and, eventually, his life.

In this review, we put Rise of the Tomb Raider through a variety of mainstream, performance-segment, and high-end graphics cards, including a multi-GPU option of epic value - across the four most popular resolutions, including 1440p and 4K Ultra HD. This review should also give you an idea of how much you can tweak the game to suit your hardware.