

- #NEWEGG TOMB RAIDER GOTY DRIVER#
- #NEWEGG TOMB RAIDER GOTY UPGRADE#
- #NEWEGG TOMB RAIDER GOTY FULL#
- #NEWEGG TOMB RAIDER GOTY PLUS#
Again, without ray tracing the scene still looks excellent but ray tracing steps it up a notch.Īnd then here we can see where point lights come into play, which is an effect you get with the medium mode enabled. In many areas, ray tracing also delivers more depth to the scene with better and more accurate shadowing of objects such as handrails, rocks, tables and so on.

It's with these shadows, including Lara's shadow which suffers from the same issue, that ray tracing is the biggest upgrade. When switching ray tracing on, this aliasing disappears and you get a much cleaner presentation with better distance calculations. The game already appears to use distanced based shadowing for some dynamically generated shadows without ray tracing, but there's a fair bit of aliasing present even using the Ultra mode. Ray traced shadows have a number of other advantages. The ray count limitation here is too tight and while the shadows that are cast look better and more accurate, removing shadows to get this effect is not a good compromise. For some reason, the High mode just seems to remove a lot of shadows, particularly from overhead foliage, which is obviously not the intended presentation looking at both Ultra regular shadows, and Ultra ray traced shadows. To us it looks worse than non ray traced shadow due to a lack of shadow density. One thing is clear though: the High shadow mode is not good. As most games use sharper shadows, this distance-based system might be a bit jarring or look worse if you prefer standard sharper shadows. While I like the ray traced shadow presentation and believe it looks more accurate, like with other ray traced techniques the change might not be something everyone likes. In this scene for example, shadows cast from overhead foliage are soft due to the large distance between the foliage and the ground, while Lara's own shadow is much sharper as it's closer to the shadowed surface.
#NEWEGG TOMB RAIDER GOTY UPGRADE#
Ultra shadows in this game look good, they are sharp across most elements, but ray tracing is an upgrade if accuracy is what you like. Depending on the area, the difference is very noticeable, with ray traced shadows looking softer thanks to its more accurate distance-based shadowing. Where you start to notice a difference is with the High and Ultra modes.
#NEWEGG TOMB RAIDER GOTY FULL#
This is why in a lot of these comparisons there is no appreciable difference between DXR off and DXR medium.Ĭlick on all screenshots for full resolution 4K images When outdoors, the medium mode uses standard Ultra-quality shadow maps, because shadows from the sun are not ray traced here. So this would be a light from a fire or lamp, for example. The first thing to note is that the Medium ray tracing setting doesn't affect the quality of shadows in most situations, because it only ray traces point light shadows. Performance was tested for all RTX GPUs at different resolutions as well, which we'll get to later on. All testing was done on a Core i9-9900K rig, with game footage captured using the RTX 2080 Ti at 4K. After all, if you're using ray tracing you're after premium graphics, so you should already have everything cranked up to the best graphics possible. DLSS has its own setting that can be activated as well.įor the following tests and comparisons, we've set the game to use the maximum quality settings, so that's a level above the Highest preset. And then with Ultra you get more shadows and additional rays. With High, shadow maps start getting replaced in favor of more ray tracing from spot and directional lights, including the sun.
#NEWEGG TOMB RAIDER GOTY PLUS#
With Medium you get ray traced shadows for selected point lights, plus regular shadowing techniques for the rest of the game. The game provides a decent description of what each mode does. From there, you can launch the game and choose between three ray traced shadow modes: Medium, High and Ultra.
#NEWEGG TOMB RAIDER GOTY DRIVER#
There's no need for a driver update, all you require is the latest game patch, which isn't even that large. Accessing ray tracing in Shadow of the Tomb Raider is quite easy.
