Rise of the Tomb Raider gets DirectX 12 today: First in the industry, Kind of

As of today, March 11th, 2016, Rise of the Tomb Raider will implement one of the industry's first integrations of DirectX 12. This is great news.... really.

Steam users will automatically download the small 129mb patch and will expect to see some pretty big improvements in performance across the board. This doesn't mean that folks without Windows 10 can't play any more as DirectX 11 is still an option.

Grab the newest video drivers for your graphics cards to get the best performance as of yet. AMD users, make sure you choose the 16.3 hotfix driver suite.

Nvidia drivers here

AMD drivers here

I myself finally cracked and jumped on the Windows 10 bandwagon so I look forward to seeing the changes first hand.

You can read the patch notes here

And you can check out the dev blog post on the subject here

6 comments

  1. Avatar
    Cody Hall says:

    Woo glad too see the first AAA game that will make use of my “upgrade” to windows 10. I know there’s some game in early access that supports it but I’ll definitely have to try this over the weekend

      • Avatar
        Tim Chesson says:

        I read the Steam forums earlier and saw complaints of poor performance on Nvidia hardware, while others weren’t having problems. I need to update my card’s driver, which didn’t go so well last time I tried it, but I do really wanna see what DirectX 12 can do for me.

        Here’s hoping I don’t run into problems, I think I just got all my issues sorted out after my Windows 10 swap.

        • Scrooloose
          Scrooloose says:

          Yeah you know that’s a good point. You’ve got a laptop with integrated graphics if I remember right. I hadn’t even thought about that as far as updating, but I imagine you have. Let us know how it goes, good luck.

          My performance increased markedly. But then I’m using AMD stuff so perhaps that’s the difference. I don’t really see any visual improvements graphically as with how the previous DirectX versions would enhance games. I say that after playing Hitman a while as well. Seems the changes are more in the line of efficiency and performance. The dev blog speaks of some technology in DX12 that can reuse GPU power that’s being wasted, pretty cool really. It should be interesting to see IPs evolve as DX12 takes hold.

          • Avatar
            Tim Chesson says:

            I just completed it as well, finishing it out on DX12. After running the benchmark I did see some improvement, and when especially when revisiting the Geothermal Valley. I decided to try it without updating my driver, however, so there might be even more performance to be had when I do that. Here are a couple of screenshots I snagged after the benchmark was finished. The first shot is DX11, the second DX12. Not a huge improvement, but it felt better in-game.

            I’m playing on my desktop that I put together a couple of years ago. Last month I upgraded to a GTX 970 that I’ve been very happy with.

          • Scrooloose
            Scrooloose says:

            Yeah that looks pretty similar to what I had as well. Frame rate reported a pretty slight difference overall but it felt much smoother. I did notice that for the first few seconds things kind of chopped up, like it was buffering ahead or something. But after that it was smooth as ice

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