It looks like Crystal Dynamics, the studio behind Rise of the Tomb Raider, has been working on an update for the game in order to increase the performance of the game in combination with AMD’s Ryzen processors. At FullHD in combination with a medium and a high preset there is an up to 28% increase in frames per second visible.


First of all I’d like to add that ocaholic is not a big fan of showing the (so called) influence on gaming-performance a CPU can/could possibly have. If you want to show that a certain CPU performs “better” or “worse” in-game than another you first have to make sure that the GPU is not bottlenecking anymore, or in other words go low enough with the resolution and level of detail that the game is not GPU-bound anymore but CPU-bound. This in the end is entirely artificial and not gamer in the real-world would do this. If a gamer just spent north of $600 US for a GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card or higher he most certainly won’t choose a resolution which makes the title not GPU-bound anymore. What you’re most likely to do is choosing that particular combination of resolution and level of detail which runs perfectly smooth and gives you the most eye-candy. In the case of a GTX 1080 that is not FullHD, it’s at least WHQD (2560 x 1440). If you’re asking yourself now, why I chose the GTX 1080 as an example, bear with me and check the specs of the test system further below.




According to the graph above the performance after patching Rise of the Tomb Raider goes up by 29.82%, when tested at FullHD with medium preset. In the case of the same resolution and the high-preset the level of detail goes up by 25.75%.

Specifications test system

• AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Processor
• 2x8GB DDR4-3200 (14-14-14-36)
• GeForce GTX 1080 (382.33 driver)
• Asus Crosshair VI (BIOS 9943)
• Windows 10 x64 build 1607
• 1920x1080 resolution

Apart from the fact that games must be tested with a high-end graphics card at low graphics load - to remove the GPU bottleneck - we see that the memory has been overclocked to DDR4-3200 at rather sharp 14-14-14-36 timings. In such a testing scenario the timings alone have a significant effect on your frames per second. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to see that the game obviously benefits from the latest patch, but I struggle with the fact that these results have been engineered - let’s call it like that - to show the biggest possible performance difference in a scenario that is absolutely not relevant in the real world.

Nevertheless even if this is a testing scenario that is far off from what users in the real world are going to experience optimizing games towards multithreaded CPU architectures is certainly the way to go and it does add performance. It’s just not up to 30% in a real-world scenario. Still, in that context here is the statement from Crystal Dynamics - the studio behind Rise of the Tomb Raider - on what they’ve changed:

Citation :

In my personal opinion it’s again great to see that AMD is pursuing even the game developers to come up with updates to their titles but please don’t try to fool customers that they can get up to almost 30% more performance out of their gaming system. Sure technically AMD is correct, but as I explained the real-world scenario looks entirely different. I’ll pick this topic up later this week adding test results with an identically configured system running a combination of resolution and level of detail gamers actually opt for.

For now I’d like to ask you guys, what do you think about this topic?

Source: AMD Gaming Community