Performance in Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness

Tomb Raider is Tomb Raider, there is nothing I could add here. The latest Tomb Raider incarnation aka Angel of Darkness (TRAOD) acquired the support of modern graphics processors and such exciting special effects as light refraction in streams of hot air, various reflections on “complex” surfaces and in the water, blurring of objects beyond the camera focus, etc.

When we tested NVIDIA and ATI based graphics cards in Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, I used identical settings, which are inserted during profile PS 2.0 activation. I actually made two changes to these settings. First, I disabled video synchronization and second, I disabled Pixel Shader 2.0 Shadows, because the NVIDIA based graphics cards went through emergency game termination every time I tried enabling this option.

I used special integrated tools of the Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness to measure the performance of the testing participants, namely I played the preliminarily recorded scene. I have made a total of two records: one on paris2_3 level and the other one on paris5_4 level.

The first record uses fewer pixel shaders. As you can see from the screenshot below, they only apply blurring to the distanced objects located outside the camera focus:

So, first come the results for paris2_3 record:

ATI RADEON 9800 XT and RADEON 9800 PRO leave not a single chance to NVIDIA chips.

However, as soon as we enable FSAA, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and GeForce FX 5900 Ultra manage to get ahead of their rivals. As you can se from their results in higher resolutions, even though they are limited by the pixel shader processing speed, they hardly lose anything when the FSAA is enabled. While ATI RADEON 9800 XT and 9800 PRO slow down quite tangibly because of that.

Enabled anisotropic filtering allows ATI chips defeat the competitor, as we have expected.

In the heaviest mode NVIDIA graphics cards still manage to retain the leadership.