As soon as NVIDIA revealed its new RTX graphics cards, we’ve been wondering whether real-time ray tracing would be worth the performance hit or not. And it appears that its high-end GPU that will cost $1300 is unable to run Shadow of the Tomb Raider with RTX On at 1080p and with 60fps.

Our friends over at PCGamesHardware have shared an off-camera video, showing the game running with real-time ray tracing on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080Ti. Thankfully, a FRAPS overlay was present and we can see that this new GPU can run the game with 30-70fps.

For the majority of the short video, Shadow of the Tomb Raider ran with 40fps. Not silky smooth, right? The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080Ti was able to push more than 60fps when Lara was facing a wall but I’m pretty sure that PC gamers will want to admire the environments instead of looking at the sky or the ground so that they can run the game smoothly. When solving puzzles and exploring the environments, the framerate was between 30fps and 45fps.

Do also note that the game was running at 1080p, meaning that those with 1440p monitors will witness even worse framerates.

At this point we should note that Shadow of the Tomb Raider also supports some other resource-hungry graphical features on the PC, like CHS. Moreover, even the game’s PC trailer – that came out yesterday – featured slowdowns and now we know why!

UPDATE:

The developers of Shadow of the Tomb Raider have responded to the lower than expected performance of the game on the GeForce RTX 2080Ti when using RTX. According to them, the current build of the game features an early work in progress version of NVIDIA’s tech, and the final version will run better.

The Nvidia Ray Tracing technology currently being shown in Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an early work in progress version. As a result, different areas of the game have received different levels of polish while we work toward complete implementation of this new technology. — Tomb Raider (@tombraider) August 21, 2018

The final Nvidia Ray Tracing integration will be released as a post-launch update, and we are excited for our fans to experience it first-hand. — Tomb Raider (@tombraider) August 21, 2018