Intel Z97 Motherboard Roundup with ASUS, Biostar, Gigabyte and MSI

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: In Tomb Raider, there is once again very little difference between the GIGABYTE Z97X-UD5H, MSI Z97 Gaming 7, and the BIOSTAR Hi-Fi Z97WE were all within .47 frames per second of each other at 1920×1080 and only .53 frames per second separated them at 1280×1024.