Results: Tomb Raider At 3840x2160
Tomb Raider’s Ultimate quality preset is taxing—so much so that it knocks the 35 FPS average we saw in Gaming At 3840x2160: Is Your PC Ready For A 4K Display? using the Ultra preset down to 27 FPS on Nvidia’s GeForce GTX Titan. Fortunately for AMD, its Radeon R9 290X is faster, averaging just over 30 FPS.
Unfortunately, charting out frame rate over time shows that our sequence nearly drops to 15 FPS at its toughest. That’s just too low to be considered playable.
Variance is a secondary measurement, and it doesn’t really matter once a frame rate is determined to be unplayable. Nevertheless, Nvidia’s cards exhibit worst-case variances that we’d consider detectable.