Rise of the Tomb Raider received a new update. The patch update activates the game's dormant DirectX 12 option and adds support for Nvidia's VXAO. Now here's the latest news about Rise of the Tomb Raider on PC, Xbox and PS4 from Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix.
The update adds more excitement to Lara Craft's adventure. The new DirectX 12 support for Windows 10 PCs enhances the visual elements of the game, joining Gears of War: Ultimate Edition as Microsoft's next-gen games. Moreover, the update introduces new ambient occlusion technology called VXAO for high-end Nvidia GPU users. VXAO technology significantly improves lighting effects by voxelizing the scene.
As an example of how the update improves the graphics, a sample scene in Rise of the Tomb Raider at high-end setting revealed the frame rate in DirectX 12 is much higher. In a PC powered by an Intel i7-2600 processor and GTX 970 card, the game produces 60 frames per second in DirectX 12. With the same processor and graphics card, DirectX11 only produces 46 frames per second.
The bottom line is that the recent improvement squeezes more performance output in the CPU in order to feed the GPU faster.
"Another big feature, which we are also using on Xbox One, is asynchronous compute. This allows us to re-use GPU power that would otherwise go to waste, and do multiple tasks in parallel," Jurjen Katsman wrote in Tomb Raider blog post.
As for the details about VXAO technology, Nvidia describes it as the "best Ambient Occlusion solution" available in PC games today. VXAO utilizes a world-space Ambient Occlusion algorithm, and brings better image quality, finer image details and smoother response to camera motion. In simple terms, it breaks down surfaces into voxels to make lighting and shadows look better.
The Rise of the Tomb Raider DX12 patch is now available on Steam, and is expected to be released soon on the Windows 10 Store.
In a review published in GamesRadar, it says the Rise of The Tomb Raider's animation is exceptional. It gives players a thrilling and realistic gaming experience. Lara Croft's movements are realistic. Every leap, roll and zip-line descent have a right amount of plausibility. The gameplay is also fantastic. It has challenging puzzles and strong villains. IGN gave it a score of 9.3/10.
