Shadow of the Tomb Raider gameplay on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti showcases the grandeur of ray tracing but with worrying concerns

NVIDIA launched the GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti GPUs to much fanfare yesterday and the highlight of the event was the demonstration of ray tracing effects in upcoming games such as Battlefield V, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Metro: Exodus, and more. While the PC gaming community is currently debating the utility of ray tracing and its impact on games, IGN and PCGamesHardware have managed to run a short gameplay demo of the Shadow of the Tomb Raider on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. If you're hoping for extraordinary numbers, be prepared to be disappointed.

Before going on, we would like to remind our readers that this is not the final build of the game and things will change as games and drivers get more optimized towards launch. Also, PCGamesHardware reports that Shadow of the Tomb Raider will be released without ray tracing assets, which will later be added via a patch after release.

Looking at the video in the PCGH source link, we can see that the game coasts close to 30 fps with ray tracing enabled at 1080p max settings while occasionally touching just below the 50 fps mark. A similar frame rate can be experienced in IGN's gameplay video (embedded below). There were a few dropped frames as well. Quite understandably, even NVIDIA fans are upset about the initial performance and are planning to hold off pre-orders before actually seeing real-world benchmarks comparing the RTX cards to the non-RTX Pascal versions. Gamers are also interested in waiting for 4K performance before splurging cash on the new cards. 

PCGamesN also echoes similar feelings and states,

"It's tough not to be concerned when the ultra expensive, ultra enthusiast RTX 2080 Ti isn't able to hit 60 fps at 1080p settings."

There is still hope, though. A DICE developer working on Battlefield V wrote on the ResetEra forums, 

"I think people will be surprised at how well this will run in their respective final releases. :)"

When asked about the possibility of playing Battlefield V at 1080p 60fps with ray tracing, the developer replied, 

"Sorry, can't speak about specifics yet. A bit too early. :D"

It is still early to arrive at a conclusion about the new GPUs. Performance numbers will only be available next month and only then we can get to know if ray tracing is another Hairworks or PhysX in the making. Having said that, real time ray tracing is an extremely compute intensive application and to even pull off what we're seeing today is a commendable achievement indeed.

Do you think the pricing justifies the new capabilities on offer or is pure fps is all you care about? Let us know in the comments below.

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