RTX patch for Shadow of the Tomb Raider is available

The patch that allows Shadow of the Tombraider to use the RT cores of Nvidia RTX video cards has been released. The game will therefore receive support for RTX and DLSS. The patch was already promised when the RTX video cards were announced in August last year.

When Nvidia announced its RTX graphics cards seven months ago, Shadow of the Tomb Raider was one of the games demonstrating ray tracing. The game would be provided with RTX support with a patch and with the arrival of version 1.0.280, the time has come.

Raytracing is only applied to shadows in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, not for other lighting effects or reflections. An option has been added to the game’s menu to enable ray tracing for shadows. There is a choice of quality options Medium, High and Ultra. DLSS can only be turned on and off and is available at the resolutions of 2560×1440 pixels and 3840×2160 pixels. The technique is a form of antialiasing that should provide performance gains.

TechPowerUp has tested the patch and shows the differences before and after the patch. The website concludes that the shadows do look better with ray tracing, but that the difference is not very big because the shadows in the game already look good without the technique. The performance loss is about 30 to 50 percent. The use of DLSS delivers a performance gain of about 35 percent at a 4k resolution, according to the website.

Demonstration of ray tracing in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, shown during the introduction of the RTX graphics cards in August 2018.