Techspot benched tomb raider

[ICDP]

15MIN / 34AVG on my GTX670 at 1080p Ultra + FXAA? Man, I must be getting old cause it feels a lot smoother for me... That review looks totally off.

Also... top 5 all time? What? It has a score of 86... While that's high, sure, it's nowhere near the top...

http://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/release-date/available/pc/metascore?view=condensed

Not even the first page...

I assume he means the Metacritic user score, not reviewers score.

http://www.metacritic.com/browse/ga...ases/pc/metascore?view=condensed&hardware=all

 

[wand3r3r]

The article is dated today but it can take many days to conduct tests. This benchmark is taken using 1.0.716.5. The latest patch release is 1.0.718.4 and it fixes Nvidia performance and lockup issues.


Patch release notes.

We have just made public a new version of the PC version of Tomb Raider, build 1.0.718.4. This patch will be applied by Steam automatically when you next start the game. If your game does not update, please restart the Steam client.

This update addresses a variety of issues that we either found out about shortly before release or immediately after.

Fixes include:

- Addressed some stability and startup issues on machines that have both Intel and NVIDIA graphics hardware.
- Fix for players being unable to progress related to the boat in the beach area.
- Some fixes for crashes on startup and when selecting Options.
- Some small improvements to TressFX hair rendering.
- Fixes for various graphics glitches, including certain effects not being visible in fullscreen mode.
- Fixed a problem that caused some users to not be able to use exclusive fullscreen.
- Added support for separate mouse/gamepad inversion for aiming, as well as support for x-axis inversion.
- Fixes related to the benchmark scene and benchmark mode.
- Various other small fixes.

While we expect this patch to be an improvement for everyone. If you do have trouble with this patch and prefer to stay on the old version we made a Beta available on Steam, Build716.5, that can be used to switch back to the previous version. Please note however that you can only play multiplayer with people that share your version.

We expect further patches to follow fairly soon, addressing further issues we see being brought up by players, and are actively monitoring these and other forums looking for issues.

While I don't doubt there will be some performance increases, it doesn't even state anything about such things. It talks about bug fixes and stability, not performance increases. Unless you consider 'Fixes related to the benchmark scene'.

I'm not trying to deny they may come, but this quoted text doesn't show much about it?

Edit. I wonder how much TR can improve NV scores alone, wouldn't they have to come from NV drivers, not so much the game itself? It seems like if they start improving performance it will be to both, unless they are suddenly going to start optimizing the game after it's on the shelves towards nv, but that seems a little late in the game. Whatever, I guess we'll see from the benchmarks if they come.

 

[notty22]

While I don't doubt there will be some performance increases, it doesn't even state anything about such things. It talks about bug fixes and stability, not performance increases. Unless you consider 'Fixes related to the benchmark scene'.

I'm not trying to deny they may come, but this quoted text doesn't show much about it?

It's in the conclusion and that's been posted a couple times in this thread already. One setting is borking Nvidia performance.

The Nvidia cards only performed as expected when we used the high quality preset, and the changes when shifting down from ultra to high include texture quality, level of detail, depth of field and SSAO. After testing each item, we found that changing DOF to normal while leaving everything else on ultra produced a 48% boost from 54fps to 80fps -- and that's with TressFX enabled as it is by default on ultra quality.

Folks playing with an Nvidia card should definitely watch for a driver update that fixes this issue.

The author is a reviewer, the fix might be another patch and/or driver update, we won't know until it's addressed.

 

[Qbah]

I assume he means the Metacritic user score, not reviewers score.

http://www.metacritic.com/browse/ga...ases/pc/metascore?view=condensed&hardware=all

Nope...

http://www.metacritic.com/browse/ga...lable/pc/userscore?view=detailed&hardware=all

 

[-Slacker-]

The version number used is in the actual charts.

Right. Sorry about that then *huggles*

 

[Termie]

It's in the conclusion and that's been posted a couple times in this thread already. One setting is borking Nvidia performance.
The author is a reviewer, the fix might be another patch and/or driver update, we won't know until it's addressed.

I really love TechSpot's game performance reviews, and this one likely took at least 12 hours to run (an actual 90-second run performed at 3 settings, 3 resolutions, on 27 systems, plus another 25 or CPU benchmarks). But alas, he rushed it out the door - almost every graph has pretty serious errors, including the one above.

While you might think that it's because the cards are ranked by minimums, that's actually not the case - look at 7870 vs. 6970 and then 680 vs. 7970.

He needs to re-run those graphs, and I feel sorry for him, because I know it took a long time.

 

[notty22]

I really love TechSpot's game performance reviews, and this one likely took at least 12 hours to run (an actual 90-second run performed at 3 settings, 3 resolutions, on 27 systems, plus another 25 or CPU benchmarks). But alas, he rushed it out the door - almost every graph has pretty serious errors, including the one above.

While you might think that it's because the cards are ranked by minimums, that's actually not the case - look at 7870 vs. 6970 and then 680 vs. 7970.

He needs to re-run those graphs, and I feel sorry for him, because I know it took a long time.

He might have done ranking like this on purpose based on the time the results sat near minimum or average. It's easy to discredit a whole review, one swipe at a time. He would never publish, if he dealt with every ocd complaint.

 

[Termie]

He might have done ranking like this on purpose based on the time the results sat near minimum or average. It's easy to discredit a whole review, one swipe at a time. He would never publish, if he dealt with every ocd complaint.

As I said, I typically like his reviews, and I'm usually the one who posts them to this forum.

But this graph is absolutely not ready to be made public:

It's full of blatant errors and inconsistencies. That's not being "OCD", that's being honest. It's pretty clear that his data and his graphs are not matching up.

 

[railven]

I always turn DOF features off anyway. They aren't "realistic" in any way and just server to blur part of the screen. They're an attempt to introduce a major flaw in cameras in to a game which has no need to suffer from that flaw. Your eyes never encounter depth of field effects as they are used in games. Granted, you *do* experience depth of field as part of your normal vision, but it is *never* present in what you are focusing on, and given that all but the center of your vision is amazingly blurry anyway, we just don't need it in games. It would make sense in a VR head tracking type system where your eyes are always on the center of the screen, but when you're playing a game, and look off center and it's arbitrarily blurry, it's just stupid. If I were whatever the character is and moved my vision over there, it's not going to be blurry at all, my eyes would focus on the new location.

The only place these silly DOF effects make sense are when your character is looking through optics, like binoculars, a scope, a camera, etc.

It also might be ok with eye tracking that always shifted the focus of DOF to where you are looking at the screen, but again, I know of no one who plays games that only ever focuses dead center on the screen and never looks to the side at all. That's what they always simulate with "DoF".

Gonna have to disagree with this, I think good DOF adds a nice level of immersion (no I don't mean the radial blur CoD uses, I hate that version of DOF.)

Objects in the background should be blurred, and yes I agree some games lay it on thick, but I found it a nice touch in Metro 2033 and Crysis 2. Specific objects in the background outside of the focal view are blurred/less-focused which is natural. In games with an open landscape, looking at a pilar in front of you, the background shouldn't be clear as day for 100+yds, it should slowly lose focus.

I haven't tested DOF in this game, but in games like Metro 2033/BF3/Crysis 2, I feel it adds a nice level of immersion as you need to pan to focus, not just spot things over the horizon 300yds away.

 

[tviceman]

Not at all surprising since we all know that Nvidia is working on performance issues with Crystal Dynamix for the game. When the issues are I hope techspot re-runs the benchmarks.

 

[railven]

Not at all surprising since we all know that Nvidia is working on performance issues with Crystal Dynamix for the game. When the issues are I hope techspot re-runs the benchmarks.

I'm sure they will. Even so with whatever these technical issues are, it doesn't seem like the GeForces do terribly bad at this, well except for Titan but I'm sure those are teething issues more than anything else.

 

[blackened23]

Not at all surprising since we all know that Nvidia is working on performance issues with Crystal Dynamix for the game. When the issues are I hope techspot re-runs the benchmarks.

Yeah, I'd also rather see a review after the fixes are made. HardOCP is doing a comprehensive comparison - Not sure how soon it will be up, but it will include any such fixes.

 

[blackened23]

Gonna have to disagree with this, I think good DOF adds a nice level of immersion (no I don't mean the radial blur CoD uses, I hate that version of DOF.)

Objects in the background should be blurred, and yes I agree some games lay it on thick, but I found it a nice touch in Metro 2033 and Crysis 2. Specific objects in the background outside of the focal view are blurred/less-focused which is natural. In games with an open landscape, looking at a pilar in front of you, the background shouldn't be clear as day for 100+yds, it should slowly lose focus.

I haven't tested DOF in this game, but in games like Metro 2033/BF3/Crysis 2, I feel it adds a nice level of immersion as you need to pan to focus, not just spot things over the horizon 300yds away.

I disagree with you so much on Metro 2033. There are definitely games with horrible DOF implementations that degrade, rather than improve the quality - metro 2033 stands out as one such example IMO. The effect in metro 2033 doesn't provide depth, it's a sudden jarring change in the scene with the background appearing like a muddy mess. Conversely, in Witcher 2 everything is smooth and seamless.

Fortunately, there are many good implementations as well. As mentioned earlier, Witcher 2 has probably the best DOF i've ever seen in a game.

 

[3DVagabond]

I get that is what you are saying, but I'd still like to see the new patch bench-marked.

Look the FX-8150 initial performance, and claims that some magical bulldozer patch would fix it's performance, patch came and the effective difference in performance was 1% or less.

I'm curious what the actual performance numbers look like after this supposed "fix".

OMG I can't believe Titan just got compared to Bulldozer! That was cold. lol

That said, I'm curious myself to see if they can fix this. If it turns out that Kepler is just bad at the types of compute languages used in modern games, what then? AMD can just take advantage like was done with tessellation. This is a bigger performance hit though.

 

[notty22]

It's a bug with DOF, Nvidia Titan or gtx 680, it's obtuse to start with the Titan bashing, it would be like claiming 7970 2 way -3 way and -4 way crossfire that cost , well over a thousand is representative by this! This only !
From another thread on front page.

 

[KingFatty]

I think we all agree that this is an issue with a particular feature. I don't see anyone characterizing this as Nvidia being sloppy or having bad drivers? Or should we blame Nvidia here for not having good drivers?

 

[3DVagabond]

It's a bug with DOF, Nvidia Titan or gtx 680, it's obtuse to start with the Titan bashing, it would be like claiming 7970 2 way -3 way and -4 way crossfire that cost , well over a thousand is representative by this! This only !
From another thread on front page.

Well, someone did actually post that all by itself as being indicative of 7970 performance.

The obvious reason for those results, and not just on AMD cards, is at that res and settings the game is using more than 3 gig of VRAM.

 

[Rvenger]

It's a bug with DOF, Nvidia Titan or gtx 680, it's obtuse to start with the Titan bashing, it would be like claiming 7970 2 way -3 way and -4 way crossfire that cost , well over a thousand is representative by this! This only !
From another thread on front page.

They should have slipped in a Toxic 7970 6gb and watched a slideshow.

 

[3DVagabond]

They should have slipped in a Toxic 7970 6gb and watched a slideshow.

Yes, it would have been quite interesting to see Toxic's compared. Trying to fit 4 of them on a single board would have made for interesting photos.

 

[Dankk]

So wait, people are now saying that DoF is a performance killer in this game? I was under the impression that the main culprit was TressFX. All those times when my FPS tanked during certain camera angles in cutscenes, it was because of the backround blur, and not Lara's hair? I must go back and test this.

 

[Rvenger]

Yes, it would have been quite interesting to see Toxic's compared. Trying to fit 4 of them on a single board would have made for interesting photos.

Cramming 4 of them in a case...Wouldn't be surprised to see them thermal throttle. You would have to mount blocks on them to get them down to decent temps.

 

[3DVagabond]

So wait, people are now saying that DoF is a performance killer in this game? I was under the impression that the main culprit was TressFX. All those times when my FPS tanked during certain camera angles in cutscenes, it was because of the backround blur, and not Lara's hair? I must go back and test this.

Yes. Report back on your findings. I want to see if DoF hurts performance on your setup too. Or is it only nVidia it's affecting.