Crystal Dynamics' reboot of Tomb Raider has just been released, and being an AMD Gaming Evolved title, Radeon owners haven't been having an issue running it at all. GeForce users on the other hand? Well, you should read on.
GeForce users have been having huge problems with the game, so much so that NVIDIA's Andrew Burnes, the editor of the official GeForce.com website, wrote a three-paragraph statement regarding the performance issues of Tomb Raider on NVIDIA hardware:
We are aware of performance and stability issues with GeForce GPUs running Tomb Raider with maximum settings. Unfortunately, NVIDIA didn't receive final game code until this past weekend which substantially decreased stability, image quality and performance over a build we were previously provided. We are working closely with Crystal Dynamics to address and resolve all game issues as quickly as possible.
Please be advised that these issues cannot be completely resolved by an NVIDIA driver. The developer will need to make code changes on their end to fix the issues on GeForce GPUs as well. As a result, we recommend you do not test Tomb Raider until all of the above issues have been resolved.
In the meantime, we would like to apologize to GeForce users that are not able to have a great experience playing Tomb Raider, as they have come to expect with all of their favorite PC games.
I'm sure NVIDIA users are hating this right now, but the shoe is surely on the other foot at the moment. NVIDIA's The Way It's Meant To Be Played program really hurt AMD Radeon users for a long time, and now NVIDIA are getting a taste of their own medicine. The bigger factor here is that consumers are the ones that lose out, not the company.
I think we're going to see more of this going into the future, with AMD powering all three of the next-gen consoles... we should see NVIDIA not being able to directly compete, or out-perform AMD with this fact in mind. Keep checking back as we'll have a look at the performance of Tomb Raider in single- and multi-monitor tests with some Sapphire Radeon HD 7970s over the weekend.