#Shadow of the tomb raider definitive edition vs standard driver
#Shadow of the tomb raider definitive edition vs standard upgrade
#Shadow of the tomb raider definitive edition vs standard full

#Shadow of the tomb raider definitive edition vs standard upgrade

Ultra shadows in this game look good, they are sharp across most elements, but ray tracing is an upgrade if accuracy is what you like. Depending on the area, the difference is very noticeable, with ray traced shadows looking softer thanks to its more accurate distance-based shadowing. Where you start to notice a difference is with the High and Ultra modes.

#Shadow of the tomb raider definitive edition vs standard full

This is why in a lot of these comparisons there is no appreciable difference between DXR off and DXR medium.Ĭlick on all screenshots for full resolution 4K images When outdoors, the medium mode uses standard Ultra-quality shadow maps, because shadows from the sun are not ray traced here. So this would be a light from a fire or lamp, for example. The first thing to note is that the Medium ray tracing setting doesn't affect the quality of shadows in most situations, because it only ray traces point light shadows. Performance was tested for all RTX GPUs at different resolutions as well, which we'll get to later on. All testing was done on a Core i9-9900K rig, with game footage captured using the RTX 2080 Ti at 4K. After all, if you're using ray tracing you're after premium graphics, so you should already have everything cranked up to the best graphics possible.

DLSS has its own setting that can be activated as well.įor the following tests and comparisons, we've set the game to use the maximum quality settings, so that's a level above the Highest preset. And then with Ultra you get more shadows and additional rays. With High, shadow maps start getting replaced in favor of more ray tracing from spot and directional lights, including the sun. With Medium you get ray traced shadows for selected point lights, plus regular shadowing techniques for the rest of the game. The game provides a decent description of what each mode does. From there, you can launch the game and choose between three ray traced shadow modes: Medium, High and Ultra.

#Shadow of the tomb raider definitive edition vs standard driver

There's no need for a driver update, all you require is the latest game patch, which isn't even that large. And with plenty more games set to support it (opens in new tab), it looks like Intel should be good in a good place come October 12 and the launch of its Arc A770 GPUs.Accessing ray tracing in Shadow of the Tomb Raider is quite easy. Overall, this is an encouraging start for Intel's XeSS.

Intel has also made the SDK for XeSS available on Github (opens in new tab). DLSS 3 only works with the new Ada Lovelace GPUs though, which limits its appeal somewhat. Of course, Nvidia has just announced DLSS 3 will launch with its RTX 40-series graphics cards, and that promises big things for frame rates. This also gives owners of AMD's RDNA 2 GPUs an option for higher performance too.

The Quality setting produced a good final image and enjoyed a 17% bump in performance at the highest settings.įor comparison the DLSS Quality setting ups the performance by 25%, so that's still the better choice if you have an Nvidia GPU, and it's tough to see any difference between the final images. As far as quality is concerned, I saw no notable artifacts while benchmarking.