ASUS Z97-Pro Wi-Fi AC Intel Z97 Motherboard Review

Tomb Raider

On March 5th, 2013 Square Enix released Tomb Raider, billed as a reboot of the franchise. In Tomb Raider, the player is confronted with a much younger Lara Croft who is shipwrecked and finds herself stranded on a mysterious island rife with danger, both natural and human. In contrast to the earlier games Croft is portrayed as vulnerable, acting out of necessity, desperation and sheer survival rather than for a greater cause or personal gain.

The game has been built on Crystal Dynamics’s game engine called the “Crystal Engine” and the graphics look fantastic. AMD and Crystal Dyanmic’s worked on a new technology called TressFX Hair, which AMD describes as the worlds first in-game implementation of a real-time, per-strand hair physics system for this game title. We set the image quality to ultimate for benchmarking, but we disabled TressFX Hair under the advanced tab to be fair to NVIDIA graphics cards that don’t support the feature.

Benchmark Results: Once again, the ASUS Z97-Pro [Wi-Fi ac] and the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD5TH were sporting negligible differences in the latest iteration of the Tomb Raider franchise. At 1280×1024 the ASUS Z97-Pro averaged 116.27 frames per second while the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD5TH averaged a hair more at 116.57 frames per second, a whopping .3 frames per second lead. Increasing the resolution to 1920×1080 the ASUS Z97-Pro took the lead by .03 frames per second averaging 85.20 frames per second versus 85.17 frames per second.