Introduction and Specifications

I still remember the first Tomb Raider on the original Sony PlayStation, my neighbor at the time was around 10 years older than me (I was 12-13 at the time) and obviously had a job. High school me thought it was mind-blowing for someone to own this powerful console, and to be running Tomb Raider.

The graphics were incredible, and it was such an amazing game to play at the time. Between then and now, we've seen a bunch of Tomb Raider games, some movies starring Angelina Jolie and everything in between. Crystal Dynamics have now rebooted Tomb Raider, and it has AMD behind them.

Tomb Raider falls under AMD's "Gaming Evolved" banner, with the company working closely with Crystal Dynamics. The game features better performance on Radeon GPUs, better textures and TressFX Hair - the world's first real-time hair physics in a game.

I've played the game for all of 15 or so minutes, and didn't think much of it, but it does have a built-in benchmark that we've run in both 1080p and 5760x1080p. This is going to be the first of many games we're going to try out in various resolutions, so continue checking back for some more GPU goodness!

For your information, I'm running:

- Intel Core i7 3770K @ 4.8GHz

- Corsair H100 Hydro Cooler

- Corsair Force Series GT 240GB SSD

- ASRock Z77 Extreme 9 motherboard

- Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 7970 Dual-X OC Edition (x2)

- Lian Li PC-T60 Pitstop

- Corsair Dominator Platinum - 16GB kit of 2133MHz DDR3 RAM

- Windows 7 Ultimate Edition x64

- AMD Catalyst 13.2 beta 4 drivers

I'd like to extend a big thank you to Sapphire, Corsair and ASRock for supplying the parts for this machine, I couldn't write this article or any future articles without this hardware!

It's a seriously nice machine, and really powers through what I do each day. I've got the CPU clocked up to remove any potential CPU-based bottlenecks, the RAM is at stock as it doesn't really help gaming performance all that much and everything else is at out-of-the-box settings.