RTX Ray Tracing: Shadow of the Tomb Raider
 |
Lara Croft is back in an epic adventure that takes you through Mesoamerica to the lost city of Paititi. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider you can expect mesmerising landscapes to traverse, plenty of weapons to master, and of course, as one of the first games to support ray-traced shadows, this is an ideal title for testing your new GeForce RTX hardware.
Why pay around £475 for a GeForce RTX 2070 Super when Radeon RX 5700 XT offers, in some cases, almost identical performance for 20 per cent less? We've posed that question a few times, and the obvious answer is that the GeForce offers extra graphics goodness in the form of the 320 tensor cores and 40 RT cores.
The much-vaunted RTX special sauce hasn't yet had a large enough pool of compatible games for it to be deemed essential, but it is one area in which the GeForce cards offer something the competition does not. When testing Shadow of the Tomb Raider, we see a meaningful performance improvement when switching from traditional TAA to cloud-accelerated DLSS, and though enabling high levels of ray tracing takes a toll on performance, image quality is enhanced by more realistic shadows that do a decent job of enhancing in-game ambiance.
Will ray tracing become a key visual enhancement for PC games in the next 12 months? That depends on developer support, but Nvidia will need a few high-profile RTX games, at the very least, in order to justify the price premium over competing Radeons.
