EVGA GeForce GTX 970 Hybrid Gaming Video Card Review

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a third-person action-adventure video game developed by Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix. It is the sequel to the 2013 video game Tomb Raider, which was itself, the second reboot to its series. It was released for Microsoft Windows in January 2016. Players control Lara Croft through various environments, battling enemies, and completing puzzle platforming sections, while using improvised weapons and gadgets in order to progress through the story.

Crystal Dynamics used a proprietary game engine called ‘Foundation’ for Rise of the Tomb Raider and it is able to create some pretty nice looking graphics. We tested Rise of the Tomb Raider with the Very High preset, but then changed the ambient occlusion setting from HBAO+ (an NVIDIA developed feature) to ‘ON’ to have as fair of a match up as we could. We also disabled VSync.

Once we had the graphics and display settings figured out we used FRAPS to manually benchmark a section of the Siberian Wilderness that is about 10% into the game for a couple minutes. Rise of the Tomb Raider does not have a built-in benchmark, so this is one of the only ways you can benchmark this particular game title.

1080P Benchmark Results: For those running Full HD 1080P displays the good news is that all higher-end desktop graphics cards are able to play Rise of the Tomb Raider with 60 FPS averages. The GeForce GTX 970 and Radeon R9 390 still dip down into the low 50 FPS range at times, but the performance on the cards is more than acceptable as we played from the start of the game (Mountain Peak) to the Soviet Installation on the Radeon R9 390 without any major performance issues that we noticed. If you can afford higher-end card than a GeForce GTX 970 or Radeon R9 390 you should be able to stay above 60 FPS at all times.

1440P Benchmark Results: The EVGA GeForce GTX 970 Hybrid Gaming graphics card was able to best both the Zotac GeForce GTX 970 Amp! Omega and the XFX Radeon R9 390 Black Edition OC at 2560×1440!

4K Ultra HD Benchmark Results: Rise of the Tomb Raider with these image quality settings were tough on the GeForce GTX 970 cards as they fell into last place and averaged in the low 20 FPS range and you could certainly see screen tearing and the gamplay was far from stellar at 4K Ultra HD resolutions on this card.