This one is the big reboot for our girl Lara Croft. It is running on a significantly enhanced version of the Crystal Engine from developer Crystal Dynamics. For a while, this bench heavily favored AMD video cards with its use of TressFX. The playing field has evened out since. So we take the twin-Win OSes to task with the game’s Ultimate quality benchmark.
 |
| Tomb Raider Performance
|
|
Lara Croft Is Still Doing Her Thing
|
|
Nothing more significant was revealed in this test either. There was virtually no change in performance between Windows 10 and Windows 8.1 when benching Tomb Raider. In fact, the average scores are neck-in-neck.
| The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
| Verdant Open-World RPG Monster Slaying
|
|
This is the latest from CD Projekt Red. It’s a single-player open-world RPG built on the company’s own REDengine 2. Already one of the more graphic-intensive 3D game engines to date—the REDengine 2 has since been upgraded from The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings. The engine now makes use of NVIDIA Gameworks technologies. These include NVIDIA PhysX, NVIDIA HairWorks and NVIDIA HBAO+ Ambient Occlusion. Other intensive features on offer are Chromatic Aberration, PBR (physics-based rendering), DX11 tessellation effects, dense moving grass and foliage and vast draw distances--just to name a few. The engine also utilizes a stream loading system so the game can more seamlessly transition from smaller more confined environs to larger wide open plains and areas spanning expansive bodies of water. For The Witcher 3 test, all settings were placed on the High presets.
We hope a good strong DirectX 12 update hits The Witcher 3 someday, though we've heard no such rumblings. Porting to the new API is a tall order for any game developer that has pulled together a title from the ground-up on the previous gen DX11 API. As for the here and now, the game’s DX11 performance is about the same on both OSes. However a small trend is forming in favor of Windows 10, as it seems to be just a hair better here as well. Onward...
| | Tomb Raider Performance | | Lara Croft Is Still Doing Her Thing |
|
