Results: Tomb Raider
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AMD’s new dual-GPU juggernaut takes a first-place finish in Tomb Raider, followed not far behind by GeForce GTX 780 Tis in SLI, Radeon R9 290Xes in CrossFire, and twin Titans.
There’s one particularly demanding sequence in our benchmark that pushes every solution hard. It’s responsible for knocking the Radeon HD 7990 and GeForce GTX 690 down under 40 FPS.
However, Nvidia’s cards are at a notable disadvantage in that they don’t handle the Ultimate preset’s TressFX feature properly. Rather than flowing naturally, Lara’s hair shimmers and pops.
Although this is an AMD Gaming Evolved title, the Radeons demonstrate higher frame time variance than Nvidia’s cards. The results aren’t bad, but you can clearly see in the frame time chart there are a few spikes and overall-higher averages.
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More so than Thief, Tomb Raider gobbles up memory. The GeForce GTX 690 crashes before our benchmark finishes, in fact. A pair of Hawaii GPUs, each with 4 GB of fast GDDR5, handle this game best. Even if the Nvidia boards were able to deliver comparable frame rates, they’re still not able to render the TressFX effect correctly.
The Radeon R9 295X2 and two 290Xes in CrossFire perform almost identically. Frame rate over time also shows us how hard Nvidia’s cards get hit when the compute-intensive TressFX technology is featured prominently in the benchmark scene (those big dips correspond to up-close views of Lara’s hair).
The longest bars come from AMD’s Radeon HD 7990, which isn’t playable at 4K using Tomb Raider’s Ultimate quality preset anyway.
