Nixxes Software, the game studio that created Rise of the Tomb Raider, has released a new patch for the game that enables support for DirectX 12, making it one of the first games to make use of the recent API. The company said that DX12 increases performance of the game by sharing the workload across multiple CPU threads. Nixxes said, “The majority of the DirectX 11 related work is happening on a single core.”
With DX12, because it offers lower-level hardware access, that workload can be spread across all available cores, which should give processors like AMD’s 8-core FX series and Intel’s Core i7 an additional performance gain.
In addition to DX12, the new Rise of the Tomb Raider patch adds VXAO support, which is a newly announced Nvidia GameWorks technology. Nvidia said VXAO “is the highest quality Ambient Occlusion solution available in PC games today.” VXAO voxelizes the scene to achieve “superior image quality, smoother response to camera motion, finer details and greater accuracy than screen-space solutions.”
DirectX 12 support may make the game run better (or not) on your system, but Nvidia said VXAO technology is very taxing on your GPU. The company said the process is “complex and computationally heavy” and recommends Maxwell GPUs for their geometry shader capabilities.
The Rise of the Tomb Raider patch is available now through Steam and will hit the Windows store in the near future. To make use of VXAO, you will need the latest Nvidia Game Ready WHQL driver, version 354.61.
