Gaming: Shadow of the Tomb Raider (DX12)

The latest instalment of the Tomb Raider franchise does less rising and lurks more in the shadows with Shadow of the Tomb Raider. As expected this action-adventure follows Lara Croft which is the main protagonist of the franchise as she muscles through the Mesoamerican and South American regions looking to stop a Mayan apocalyptic she herself unleashed. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the direct sequel to the previous Rise of the Tomb Raider and was developed by Eidos Montreal and Crystal Dynamics and was published by Square Enix which hit shelves across multiple platforms in September 2018. This title effectively closes the Lara Croft Origins story and has received critical acclaims upon its release.

The integrated Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark is similar to that of the previous game Rise of the Tomb Raider, which we have used in our previous benchmarking suite. The newer Shadow of the Tomb Raider uses DirectX 11 and 12, with this particular title being touted as having one of the best implementations of DirectX 12 of any game released so far.

AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List
Game Genre Release Date API IGP Low Med High
Shadow of the Tomb Raider Action Sep
2018
DX12 720p
Low
1080p
Medium
1440p
High
4K
Highest

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

SOTR Low Medium High
Average FPS
95th Percentile

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Gaming: Grand Theft Auto V Gaming: F1 2018
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  • tamalero - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link

    Aaah yes.. the presenter "forgot" to say it was heavily overclocked..
  • arh2o - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link

    Hey Ian, nice review. But you guys really need to stop testing games with an ancient GTX 1080 from 1H 2016...it's almost 3 years old now. You're clearly GPU bottle-necked on a bunch of these games you've benchmarked. At least use a RTX 2080, but if you're really insistent on keeping the GTX 1080, bench at 720p with it instead of your IGP. For example:

    Final Fantasy XV: All your CPUs have FPS between 1-4 frames of difference. Easy to spot GPU bottleneck here.

    Shadow of War Low: Ditto, all CPUs bench within the 96-100 FPS range. Also, what's the point of even including the medium and high numbers? It's decimal point differences on the FPS, not even a whole number difference. Clearly GPU bottle-necked here even at 1080p unfortunately.
  • eddman - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link

    Xeons don't even have an IGP. That IGP in the tables is simply the name they chose for that settings, which includes 720 resolution, since it represents a probable use case for an IGP.

    Anyway, you are right about the card. They should've used a faster one, although IMO game benchmarks are pointless for such CPUs.
  • BushLin - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link

    I'm glad they're using the same card for years so it can be directly compared to previous benchmarks and we can see how performance scales with cores vs clock speed.
  • Mitch89 - Friday, February 1, 2019 - link

    That’s a poor rationale, you wouldn’t pair a top-end CPU with an outdated GPU if you were building a system that needs both CPU and GPU performance.
  • SH3200 - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link

    For all the jokes its getting doesn't the 7290F actually run at a higher TDP using the same socket? Intel couldn't have just have taken the coolers from the Xeon DAP WSes and used those instead?
  • evernessince - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link

    How is 3K priced right? You can purchased a 2990WX for half that price and 98% of the performance. $1,500 is a lot of extra money in your wallet.
  • GreenReaper - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link

    Maybe they thought since it was called the 2990WX it cost $2990...
  • tygrus - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link

    1) A few cases showed the 18core Intel CPU beat their 28core. I assume the benchmark and/or OS is contributing to a reduced performance for the 28 core Intel and the 32 core AMD (TR 2950 beats TR 2990 a few times).

    2) Do you really want to use 60% more power for <25% increase of performance?

    3) This chip is a bit like the 1.13GHz race in terms of such a small release & high cost it should be ignored by most of us as a marketing stunt.
  • GreenReaper - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link

    Fewer cores may be able to boost faster and have less contention for shared resources such as memory bandwidth. This CPU tends to only win by any significant margin when it whenuse all of its cores. Heck, you have the 2700X up there in many cases.

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