For a quarter of a century now Lara Croft has been raiding tombs across
generations of consoles and graphics card release cycles. Tomb Raider has stood the test of time and
managed to see itself through where most fail: a successful reboot. In 2013 the world was treated
to one of the best franchise reboots of all time, ultimately culminating in an epic finale in 2018
with Shadow of the Tomb Raider. What’s wild about this particular game is that the developers,
Eidos-Montreal and Nixxes Software, didn’t just sleep on the release. They’ve been
updating it constantly with new features, the latest being DLSS 2.0 support. It’s not often
we get to see a game update DLSS modes so that’s what I’m excited to dig into today.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was released on September 12, 2018, and that was quite close
to the initial release cycle of the RTX 2000 Series. This was a significant time frame as
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was one of the games touted by Nvidia as being RTX ready.
It featured next-gen features such as Ray Traced Shadows as well as the initial outing
of Deep Learning Super Sampling, or DLSS for short. The problem was, it wasn’t ready for
the game’s launch nor was the performance looking too great according to leaks and early sources.
In March 2019, SIX months following the initial release of the game,
the much-anticipated update released and fulfilled those early promises. Ray Traced Shadows and DLSS
washere. While the Ray Traced Shadows were a point of argument in regards to efficacy,
the real issue lay within the image quality of DLSS and if they really changed the gameplay Yes,
it increased performance but had some odd limitations regarding which graphics
cards were used at what resolutions AND it was indeed, quite blurry.
That was the unfortunate reality of DLSS 1.0. Since then we’ve seen massive updates
to the DLSS algorithm and it’s now past its 2.0 revision and has been rather well received. So
what happens when they decide to teach an old dog new tricks? That’s right, Shadow of the
Tomb Raider has recently been updated to support DLSS 2.0 and we get a rare insight into how much
that changes things. From performance to visuals, this update is welcome and warranted. Sure many of
us have already played the game through, twice in my case thanks to the New Game + feature,
but there’s nothing wrong with cleaning up a great game and allowing for better
performance and visuals for those diving in today.
Now normally we would go into the image quality and then talk about the performance
but this time I’m going to shift things up and get performance numbers out of the way first. I
did all the testing of the DLSS 1.0 implementation before the update dropped so in all transparency
THOSE results are obviously on a different version of the game, but still very much valid. So running
on my test bench with a Ryzen 9 3900X and a GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition at UHD 4K
we get really interesting results with settings maxed out including Ray Traced Shadows on Ultra.
I’ve included Native performance along with Ray Traced shadows and NO DLSS for comparison sake.
But, you can see in the performance results here that EVERY option of the new DLSS 2.0
update outperforms the old and less attractive DLSS 1.0 originally used. In fact we’ll look at it
shortly, but DLSS Performance mode, which I rarely ever suggest using, is ON PAR with the original
DLSS implementation’s visuals and delivers a massive 38% performance improvement. Even DLSS
Quality brings the performance back to within 10% of how the game performed with NO Ray Tracing.
When it’s that close why not just turn on the pretties and enjoy them when they matter the most.
Because DLSS Quality mode actually performs better than DLSS 1.0 I’m going to use it for
the baseline comparison when looking at image quality between the old and the new versions.Is
that unfair? Not really, since the performance is better now and there’s not much reason to
lower the quality. But first, how do they both stack up when compared against the
native image? I’ll start with the original DLSS implementation in the scene from the village.
Now, this scene actually showcases the original version of DLSS better than you might remember,
but there are some clear detriments to the image quality. You’re going to have to look
in the distance to see them but it’s not hard. The temple in the distance shows considerably
better image quality in the DLSS Quality options, even over native in my opinion. Also, take note
of the birds flying on the top right. They now look fantastic with the removal of ‘motion blur’
commonly associated with the older methods of DLSS. There is, however, one thing to point out,
and that’s the tree canopy just under that temple. The native render is the only one to not have
any artifacts here as both the OLD and NEW DLSS exhibit an level of detail bias issue here.
But it’s one of those things you’ll have to be pixel peeping to see while playing the game.
Moving to the Peruvian village we see another clear example
of the improvements made by DLSS 2.0. Sure Lara is missing her bow in the DLSS Quality section,
but that was on me for not equipping it when reloading the new update.
You can easily see the tassels from her garment, and the details of her rope are much more defined
in the new DLSS Quality setting. The real kicker comes in the foliage. The leaves and branches are
even more defined in the DLSS Quality shots where both the native and DLSS 1.0 images
suffer from TAA blur that causes one segment of a branch to seemingly float in the air.
The next side by side we’re going to look at is with the game in motion,
well the built-in benchmark in motion anyway. But here the points still stand,
as a common critique of DLSS is that blur is introduced when the game is moving
rather than standing still. Now feel free to pause the video at any time to try and get a good look.
If you do you’ll find the DLSS 2.0 Quality to be miles ahead of DLSS 1.0 and, at times,
an improvement over the native render with some of the background elements being a tad sharper.
Let’s take one last quick look at the village and see how things compare when running the
Performance option. Overall I would say that these are very similar in image quality, with the
Performance still edging it out. That’s because some of the distant details are still sharper,
AND the blur around moving objects like the birds is
gone. The big kicker here is the performance jump from 74 frames per second to over 100.
Similar image quality but way more performance? I don’t know anyone who would complain about that.
So it does look like you can teach an old dog new tricks! There haven’t been many chances
to get a look at DLSS updates for a game that’s already been released. While Metro
Exodus got a massive upgrade, it was done so through an entirely new version of the game.
This, however, is replacing the old with the new in the SAME game. While it is still up
for debate on the efficacy of how Ray Tracing Shadows are used in the game,
I think this ends the debate on the improvements made with DLSS.
With this update, you can now run Shadow of the Tomb Raider with all of the settings cranked up,
including ray tracing, and enable DLSS without the dreaded smear
you would have in the past. It’s really cool to see that even DLSS Performance
matches the image quality ofDLSS 1.0. For those who don’t mind that lower setting they’ll
be greeted to a MASSIVE performance boost unlike anything this game has seen before.
And with that, I want to thank you all for joining me on this adventure
back to the Peruvian Jungle with the Tomb Raider herself. This was a quick look at
how the DLSS 2.0 update was able to impact the visual fidelity of Shadow of the Tomb Raider
and a rare treat test. Let me know if you enjoyed it by hitting that like and make
sure you’re subscribed here at PCWorld for even more PC Hardware and software goodness!