The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X Review: CPUs on Steroids

Rise of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 4K)

One of the newest games in the gaming benchmark suite is Rise of the Tomb Raider (RoTR), developed by Crystal Dynamics, and the sequel to the popular Tomb Raider which was loved for its automated benchmark mode. But don’t let that fool you: the benchmark mode in RoTR is very much different this time around.

Visually, the previous Tomb Raider pushed realism to the limits with features such as TressFX, and the new RoTR goes one stage further when it comes to graphics fidelity. This leads to an interesting set of requirements in hardware: some sections of the game are typically GPU limited, whereas others with a lot of long-range physics can be CPU limited, depending on how the driver can translate the DirectX 12 workload.

Where the old game had one benchmark scene, the new game has three different scenes with different requirements: Spine of the Mountain (1-Valley), Prophet’s Tomb (2-Prophet) and Geothermal Valley (3-Mountain) - and we test all three (and yes, I need to relabel them - I got them wrong when I set up the tests). These are three scenes designed to be taken from the game, but it has been noted that scenes like 2-Prophet shown in the benchmark can be the most CPU limited elements of that entire level, and the scene shown is only a small portion of that level. Because of this, we report the results for each scene on each graphics card separately.

Graphics options for RoTR are similar to other games in this type, offering some presets or allowing the user to configure texture quality, anisotropic filter levels, shadow quality, soft shadows, occlusion, depth of field, tessellation, reflections, foliage, bloom, and features like PureHair which updates on TressFX in the previous game.

Again, we test at 1920x1080 and 4K using our native 4K displays. At 1080p we run the High preset, while at 4K we use the Medium preset which still takes a sizable hit in frame rate.

It is worth noting that RoTR is a little different to our other benchmarks in that it keeps its graphics settings in the registry rather than a standard ini file, and unlike the previous TR game the benchmark cannot be called from the command-line. Nonetheless we scripted around these issues to automate the benchmark four times and parse the results. From the frame time data, we report the averages, 99^th percentiles, and our time under analysis.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

#1 Geothermal Valley Spine of the Mountain

MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance

1080p

4K

ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6G Performance

1080p

4K

Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G Performance

1080p

4K

Sapphire Nitro RX 480 8G Performance

1080p

4K

#2 Prophet’s Tomb

MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance

1080p

4K

ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6G Performance

1080p

4K

Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G Performance

1080p

4K

Sapphire Nitro RX 480 8G Performance

1080p

4K

#3 Spine of the Mountain Geothermal Valley

MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance

1080p

4K

ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6G Performance

1080p

4K

Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G Performance

1080p

4K

Sapphire Nitro RX 480 8G Performance

1080p

The 4K

It's clear from these results that the 1950X is not the best gaming chip when in its default mode.