Shadow of the Tomb raider

Where is this spot exactly? I'm playing it on Xbox One X and didn't notice such low resolution textures

 

I just fired rise of the tomb raider up, as i wanted to see if memory served me right and it did... but something else became immidiately apparent... performance is MUCH lower now, than it was 2 years ago, and there is crazy flickering going on...

Screenie taken 2 years ago



Screenie taken just now



I wonder if nvidia has fiddled a bit with the dx11 bits in the drivers (same are used by both rise of the tomb raider and shadow of the tomb raider) to make their rtx cards on dx12 appear better...

It should be noted that i played rise of the tomb raider roughly 2 months ago, and there performance was like it was 2 years ago.

 

You see trees, rocks and foilage in such low quality all around, if you look for it... even ground textures are in such low quality some places...

 

I saw performance decrese (exactly in the same place, and it's very CPU limited place) in rise of the tomb raider when win10 update instaled patch for intel CPU security problems. On your screenshot I can see GPU usage was much higher 2 years ago.

When it comes to low resolution textures, I think if you look for them, you will find low resolution textures in every game. I remember finding the same low resolution textures in rise of the tomb raider, although for the most part rise of the tomb raider lexture work was amazing.

 

Yes, cpu limitation, the exact same problem in shadow of the tomb raider dx11... again, i sense a faint smell of foul play, as it didn't used to be like that in rottr. And it should be noted that my cpu being as old as it is, haven't had any performance degrading security updates, and thank god for that.

I honestly never saw as many low quality textures rottr, and never that low quality.



Edit :

Interestingly i tested rottr again with vxao instead of hbao, and fps shot up to 65, with gpu's maxed out, where as before with hbao i was getting 55 fps... very wierd ! Flickering was still happening though...

 

Yeah I was expecting more detail in wall textures in the large cave near the start where the pyramid is. And that's on my Oled 30" 4k monitor (not a tv,) the Dell one. Nice blacks and contrast on it but still not the textures I was hoping for. On a Titan V, i7 7700 3.6ghz & AsRock B250M.

Same results on my 32" IPS 4k monitor (Samsung,) also on a Titan V but with a i7 6700 3.4ghz & AsRock H110M. Not out of that cave yet so maybe things will look sharper outdoors.

 

After examining these 4K screenshots I think you are indeed right.
http://www.pcmrace.com/2016/01/27/epic-shots-rise-of-the-tomb-rider/
http://www.pcmrace.com/2018/09/10/n...the-tomb-raider-en-4k-con-detalles-al-maximo/
Rise of the tomb raider is using much more consistent texture work.

But I have to admit, it looks like shadow of the tomb raider on the other hand is using much more tesselation and POM effects on textures, for example just look on the ground textures, there are leaves everywhere and small bumps, so overall I still like texture work in new tomb raider. Both are beautiful games.

 

For textures there's the parallax effect that smudges things a bit though tessellation is also available some objects seem to still rely on parallax even with that option enabled.
There's also some filter or other effect I haven't quite tracked down that also smudges details and almost looks like a paint effect or distortion, might be some shader or it might be that the detail here is being streamed in or hasn't loaded in full detail but I don't really know. The branches and prop textures in the above image are just really low res though so nothing fancy going on there and that carries through most of the game but the environments are bigger now and more cluttered so probably compensating for that by reducing detail? Texture pack perhaps but nothing so far for that AFAIK.

There's like 60 DLC so maybe? Ha ha. https://steamdb.info/app/750920/dlc/
(Various bonuses and special bundles but also the 28 or so actual content packs with the 7 tombs, 7 skills, 7 weapons and 7 outfits.)

EDIT: Resource packs huh, seems odd with how incredibly easy it is to find items just about everywhere including money so you can just buy the resource from any of the shopkeepers.
(Though it would explain why every gear piece has separate upgrades now instead of carrying over to the rest of the same category once installed.)

 

Good observations. Yes, levels in shadow of the tomb raider are more open now, there are much more characters, trees and other objects, including much more dense vegetation, so probably they had to sacrifice texture resolution (these game was made with console in mind first after all). How many vram ps4 or xbox one can allocate for textures around 3GB from that 8GB in total?

 

Indeed, rottr looked epic all the way through, not just in some areas, where sottr only looks good when the lighting is good, cause much of the trees, ground etc isn't very high quality.

 

Well, where rise of the tomb raider consistently uses 8+ gb vram at 4k, shadow of the tomb raider only uses 5-6 gb vram... i wonder why they would have gone and done that, unless they plan on doing a high res texture pack, cause the less vram used on much bigger areas as you say, translates to visibly lower texture quality.

 

BTW- are you playing shadow of the tomb raider with HDR on? My friend told me lighting in that game looks spectacular in HDR on his new asus HDR monitor with 1000nits and that guy is rarely impressed. Developers even have said shadow of the tomb raider was made with HDR in mind this time, and it's very possible lighting and even textures will look better in HDR. I remember seeing gears of war 4 for the first time in HDR on xbox X. Before I have seen PC version in SDR and textures looked normal, but in HDR I was blown away with textures because all specular effects looked more bright and real.

 

Yeah so far the areas are bigger instead of Soviet Installation and Geothermal Valley with some shorter passages and story parts between the two major hub areas in Rise of the Tomb Raider but and as is especially noticeable on a older system particularly with a mechanical HDD these areas are divided into various zones where it will load and unload data resulting in a bit of hitching so it's not like it's trying to load the entire zone in and thus memory usage should be controllable particularly for DirectX 12 which Nixxes already has experience with from Mankind Divided which utilized dynamic streaming for the Prague hub and under D3D12 it attempted to maintain and keep the GPU video memory even and near full load via caching which is even part of NVIDIA's DX12 Do's and Dont's guidelines as I recall.

So there's definitively room for a texture pack and pushing an additional 2 - 3 GB of texture RAM particularly for the high-end NVIDIA cards sitting at 11 or so total compared to 8 GB but that's already plenty if the game is already sitting around 5 - 5.5 GB especially if that's 3840x2160 and the rest of the settings at ultra meaning it's pushed to it's limits.

 

I personally don't like hdr, but each to their own

Low res textures will be low res no matter what though.

 

So yeah, ive put 15 hours into this game since Friday night. Damn, what a fantastic game! I love it! So much exploration and I love the graphics. I am just ultra immersed in this world, the devs put a serious amount of attention to detail. The HDR is spectacular, and not in a "everything pops" kind of way, but more of a natural "wow it looks real" kind of way. There are so many tombs and crypts to go through as well.

Oh and underwater is awesome. Its looks like my screen is a giant aquarium or something, the underwater is done very well. Damn, I just like almost everything about this game. Its not a bunch of useless killing as a filler, its more about exploration and puzzles. I cant stop gushing about this game. My gf even watched me play for almost 6 hours straight and she was impressed haha.

GET THIS GAME! DerSchniffles stamp of approval.

 

Any Tweak to force triple buffering ?

 

Just got the game for 20 Canadian VPN Argentina at MTCGame, took a less than a minute to get game after payment. Now off to play.

 

The game is fantastic, nice graphics & shadows (textures could be better) lots of hard trials and tombs to discover. Lots of different enemies and the suspense is always there! The game has some issues though, including often frame drops, freezes & crashes with DXGI errors. The DX12 renderer seems to be better producing more frames per second but it has major stability issues and sometimes the game is completely unplayable (hoping for a new patch soon)! Finally i'll post some nice images (original size 1080p, *i cut them down 30% for size*, on Ultra game settings with SMAAT2x), that i managed to take so far (35% progress!) Sorry if i spoil the game a little bit for those that haven't bought it yet!

Spoiler

 

Nice screenshots, but put them under a spoiler tag

 

So much swimming.
Anyone else?