Rise of the Tomb Raider

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: Geothermal Valley (1-Valley), Prophet’s Tomb (2-Prophet) and Spine of the Mountain (3-Mountain) - and we test all three. 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, 99th percentiles, and our time under analysis.

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


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Gaming Performance: Shadow of Mordor Gaming Performance: Rocket League
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  • Santoval - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    It's possible that the first consumer Intel 8-core will be based on Ice Lake. Cannon Lake will probably largely limited to low power CPUs, and will probably top out at 4 cores. Of course if Ice Lake is delayed again Intel might scale out Cannon Lake to more cores. Cannon Lake will be just a 10nm node of the Skylake/Kaby/Coffee Lake architecture, so it will most likely provide mostly power efficiency gains.
  • aliquis - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    Latest road map show coffee lake refresh in Q4.
  • mahoney87 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    lol :D
    https://imgur.com/SmJBKkf
    They done fecked up
  • Luckz - Monday, April 23, 2018 - link

    Rocket League is a joke game when it comes to benchmarking, optimization and so on.
  • Chris113q - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    Do you really need to be spoon-fed information? How long would it take you to find the other reviews by yourself?
    PCPER, Tweaktown, Toms Hardware, Hothardware, Computerbase all had different results (can't post link due to spam protection). Not to mention you'd have to be totally tech illiterate to believe that stock 2600 can beat 8700k by such a huge margin. Meltdown/Spectre patches don't affect gaming performance that much, so don't you put blame on that.
    The result discrepancy is embarrassing, there goes the last speck of reputation Anandtech had as a reliable source of tech news.
  • MuhOo - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    You sir are right.
  • Aegan23 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    You do know who Ian is, right? XD
  • sor - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    Anandtech has no responsibility to go out and ensure their results match up with anyone else’s. They run their own selection of tests with their own build and report the numbers. They provide the test setup, if you can’t spot the differences that’s your own issue.
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    "Anandtech has no responsibility to go out and ensure their results match up with anyone else’s"

    Responsibility? No. But should we anyhow? Yes.

    Our responsibility is accuracy. If something looks weird with our data - which it does right now - then it's our job to go back, validate, and explain the results that we're seeing. If our results disagree with other sites, then that is definitely an indication that we may have a data issue.
  • xidex2 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link

    I bet none of the other sites applied spectre and meltdown patches for Intel because they dont care about such things. Intel fanboys are now crying because someone actually showed true numbers.

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