Shadow of the Tomb Raider-new

Shadow of the Tomb Raider – 4K/60fps gaming with real-time ray tracing on Ultra is already possible


We’ve been covering 4K gaming a lot lately and as we’ve showcased, a single NVIDIA GeForce RTX2080Ti is unable to run some games in 4K/Ultra settings with 60fps. However, and if you are super rich, you can already play games with more than 60fps in 4K/Ultra settings and with real-time ray tracing effects enabled.

First things first. There are currently three games that support real-time ray tracing effects and these are: Metro Exodus, Battlefield 5 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. And while Metro Exodus and Battlefield 5 do not support SLI when the real-time ray tracing effects are enabled, Shadow of the Tomb Raider does.

YouTube’s ‘Thirty IR‘ has shared a video showing two NVIDIA RTX Titan graphics cards in SLI running the built-in benchmark tool for Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Nixxes has done an amazing job with its multi-GPU support and both of these GPUs were used to their fullest in DX12, even when the real-time ray tracing effects were enabled.

These two powerful graphics cards were able to run the benchmark with more than 60fps (though there was a small drop to 55fps during the second scene). Still, we are talking about more than 60fps with real-time ray tracing in native 4K and on Ultra settings on hardware that already exists.

Now the reason I said that this is possible only for the super rich is because a single NVIDIA Titan RTX costs around $2500 (so we are basically looking at a system that will cost more than $5000). Still, and from what we’ve seen, an SLI system with two NVIDIA RTX2080Ti GPUs could, theoretically, also offer a 60fps experience in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Two NVIDIA RTX2080Ti’s will cost you around $2000 so that would, again theoretically, be the perfect system for someone that wants to play PC games with ray tracing effects in 4K.

Now while this sounds cool, there is a big BUT and that’s the mGPU support. From what we’ve seen so far, most developers do not bother adding SLI/Crossfire support in their games. In other words, the only game that can actually take advantage of such a thing right now is Shadow of the Tomb Raider. So yeah, while it is possible to get a 4K/60fps experience on the PC with ray tracing effects – and without DLSS – when SLI is enabled, most games do not sadly support it. NVIDIA is already pushing its DLSS tech so I’m pretty sure that the green team won’t help developers implement SLI in their ray traced DX12 games, and that’s sad because SLI had been constantly giving us a glimpse at the future.