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Feral Interactive have teamed up with Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix once again to bring a top title to Linux, this time we have Rise of the Tomb Raider.

Disclosure: My key was provided by Feral Interactive ahead of release.

It’s no secret that the Linux port of the previous Tomb Raider had some performance problems, some of which were improved with a patch after release. I’m pleased to say that with Rise of the Tomb Raider, Feral Interactive have done an incredible job overall.

Even though the Linux release is coming in a good while after the Windows release, we do get the 20 Year Celebration edition which includes all the DLC. So we have the complete edition right away along with all the polish that was put into it since release.

Benchmarks

First up, let's see how well it runs with the settings on the absolute maximum, with the different AA options that are possible. Do note, that the game itself warns you that SSAA is very heavy and will reduce performance a lot. Also, Pure Hair is turned on by default for all options above the Low preset. The different presets, even the highest preset actually leaves a few options lower than the maximum, so I manually put them up for these tests. Another note about this: the Very High textures option in use for these first tests, does require a GPU on Linux to have 6GB VRAM (I've seen it practically hit the limit):

As you can see, FXAA and SMAA actually give quite reasonable performance, especially considering all other settings are cranked up to their absolute highest. Even SSAA x2 didn't do too badly with it hitting just over 60FPS average overall. To be clear though, the above results and settings are something very few people will be able to use.

Here's some additional benchmarks for settings people are actually likely to use, from the Very High preset to the Lowest, all with FXAA turned on apart from Lowest which I manually turned off (trying to simulate what people might do):


Note: In the Linux version, the Very High preset leaves textures on High, whereas on Windows it sets it to Very High.

As a bonus, here's a comparison with Windows 10. Do note, that the Windows version has two additional modes of Ambient Occlusion not included in the Linux build, so these tests are simply done with it set to "On" in both versions to compare properly. Also, to keep it to the point we're only using the "Overall Score" given here:

As expected, there's a performance gap, although it's actually less than I expected. Given that these are some insanely high settings with everything manually put up higher than the presets go, the Linux version holds up reasonably well overall. Especially considering the high VRAM use in the Linux version with my 6GB 980ti at it's limits.

Here's how the Linux version holds up on more reasonable graphical settings:

Not bad, not bad at all.

Thoughts

We could run benchmarks until we're red in the face, however, what the benchmarks actually show is quite limited of course and is nothing in comparison to a first-hand playthrough. I started off playing it on the "High" preset, but honestly, I set it to "Very High" quite quickly since it was so damn smooth and it remained smooth even then. I did keep textures down to the default of High, due to the VRAM use. I have to say, I'm personally extremely happy about how smoothly Rise of the Tomb Raider has been running on Linux.

If you thought the first Tomb Raider was action-packed, you’re in for a whole new world of crazy here. Rise of the Tomb Raider certainly isn’t gentle with thrusting you into daunting situations right off the bat. It's also quite the emotional roller-coaster of a game, one that at times blurs the lines between game and movie in the way it's presented.

Not only are you thrown in at the deep end with Rise, you’re also shown how incredibly good-looking this game is right away. Seriously, it's easily one of the best looking games available on Linux right now, some truly gorgeous scenes can be found throughout the game. I've found myself often just stopping to have a look around.

Those pictures are on the standard “High” preset with no other adjustments, yet it looks absolutely gorgeous. It's not just the graphical fidelity, but the actual style to the game is fantastic too, all the little details have made me really appreciate it.

In the first game, Lara was forced into survival against her will. Things are a bit different this time around, as Lara has gained confidence and a sense of self and is literally seeking out the danger of her own free will. You’re on the hunt for some sort of artifact to grant eternal life, Lara is sure it exists and decides to follow her father’s path. Not the most original of story basics, but it’s exciting to actually play through given what Crystal Dynamics have done with it.

The voice actor for Lara, Camilla Luddington, reprises her role for Rise of the Tomb Raider and does just as incredible a job as before. She's really believable, you really feel the intensity of everything thanks to her excellent work here.

While Rise has ample amounts of serious action, requiring some fine aim and reflexes, there's also a healthy dose of puzzles and challenges to overcome as well. As you progress, you will find certain relics that requires Lara to have a certain level of understanding in specific languages.

This makes the exploration side of it a little more fun and varied too and at times, this will give you a reason to fast-travel back to another area, once you learn enough to translate something previously left behind. This brings me to another point, there's so many camps spread across the quite large map, that actually switching between locations is incredibly easy.

Great, but what about actual Tombs to raid? Well there's optional tombs in there too, like the first one you find which is essentially a huge wooden ship buried in the ice:

While they're optional, they're certainly worth doing for the extras that they give you.

To me, it feels like they took all the good bits from the first game and expanded upon them giving you more options everywhere. There's more skills to learn for example, with the previous game having around 24 split across three classes, with Rise given you a whopping 50 skills! It's not just that there's more of them, they're much more interesting to actually unlock too. Some quite menacing in fact, like the ability to put a trap on an enemy corpse.

In addition to all the exploration, the scavenging, translating, region challenges and tomb raiding there's also completely optional missions you can do. Given out by various people you can find spread throughout the game. It's quite a nice way to take a break from the main story, while still giving you some extras to help you along your way, it makes the game a lot more varied that's for sure.

I think one of the great things about Rise of the Tomb Raider, is that it gives that open-world feeling with you being able to travel between areas and do things you miss, while not being overwhelming. It's a good mix of styles bundled together, to allow you to really push through when you want to, and take a break doing some of the smaller (but still fun) aspects of the game whenever you want.

There's a lot I haven't touched on here, partly because I don't want to spoil literally everything and also because it's such a big and varied game, if you spend a little time with it and don't rush through. Sometimes it's the little things, like talking to a character and a rabbit suddenly hops into view, looks right at the screen and then hops away…

As a reminder, to get the most performance out of the Linux version, you will likely want your CPU in Performance mode. You can do this using Feral's GameMode tool, by using this GNOME Shell extension or by doing it manually in terminal:

echo performance | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

Replace "performance" with whatever mode you wish to revert it back

The Final Verdict

I haven’t been this engrossed in a game since—well—ever? I’m not being hyperbolic here either, it has such a fantastic mix of gameplay elements all wrapped up in lush detailed graphics. From the moment I first loaded it I just couldn’t put it down. Feral did a really sweet job on the port as well.

I don't want to get ahead of myself here, but given what a great job they did, this gives me high hopes for Shadow of the Tomb Raider (the next title) to be on Linux and run well.

You can find Rise of the Tomb Raider on Humble StoreFeral Store and Steam. Fantastic to have another AAA title on Linux.

We will have a livestream of it tonight and tomorrow with Sin taking the helm, keep an eye on our Twitch channel!

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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221 comments
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tuubi Apr 21, 2018
View PC info
  • Supporter Plus
Either disabling the Steam overlay for the game or unchecking "Pause game on suspend" in the Feral launcher might help some of you with stability problems.

EDIT: Or not. It seemed to solve my problems on alt-tab, but leaving the game running in the background as a test for maybe ten minutes hard locked my whole system. I'm on an unsupported driver (390.48) and an unsupported distro so I guess I'll just have to wait for a fix or maybe a new driver. 396.18 causes problems in my other games so it's not an option.

It's not all bad though. The game seems to work just fine and run beautifully if I don't alt-tab.


Last edited by tuubi on 21 April 2018 at 8:17 am UTC
lucifertdark Apr 21, 2018
I went from unsupported distro & supported drivers to supported on both & the crashing problem has increased in speed, going from every 5 minutes to every 2 minutes. While it works it looks amazing though.
jens Apr 21, 2018
  • Supporter
I went from unsupported distro & supported drivers to supported on both & the crashing problem has increased in speed, going from every 5 minutes to every 2 minutes. While it works it looks amazing though.

Their support is usually excellent, especially once you are using their supported distributions and drivers. Please raise a support ticket.
rkfg Apr 21, 2018
Not only does it look even better then TR2013 did (and TR2013 has stunning graphics)... But it also runs a ton better too! I'm really impressed by how the game manages to hold a solid 60fps :D
Yeah, that's absolutely fantastic and unusual. At least, I'm not used to it yet. What I'm used to is microfreezes/stuttering on panoramic cutscenes that are common for OpenGL ports (and I remember the same on Windows when I was still using it about 10 years ago). Whether this happens because of texture streaming or assets loading I have no idea, but in RotTR I saw maybe a couple of occasional stutters and 99.(9)% of time it's silky smooth 60 FPS on everything maxed out (except SSAA). Even in the prettiest huge scale cutscenes the FPS is stable, I don't have the actual counter enabled in BPM so there might be slowdowns, but they're not perceivable. I.e., the frame time deviation is close to zero. I guess that's what the famous "console experience" is like except that we have 60 FPS instead of 30, mhehehe. The cutscenes are gorgeous with all that performance capture and detailed face expressions.

As of today, this game shows the best graphics available on Linux, in all imaginable aspects, period.
gojul Apr 21, 2018
Thanks Feral for this awesome port !

But too bad it needs the latest nvidia blobs. Anyway it works just fine w/ 384.111 on Debian so to me such requirements sound weird.


Last edited by gojul on 21 April 2018 at 9:57 am UTC
gojul Apr 21, 2018
As of today, this game shows the best graphics available on Linux, in all imaginable aspects, period.

Don't agree with this. Dying Light graphics are better, hoping the next game Techland releases has Linux support.


Last edited by gojul on 21 April 2018 at 10:00 am UTC
rkfg Apr 21, 2018
As of today, this game shows the best graphics available on Linux, in all imaginable aspects, period.

Don't agree with this. Dying Light graphics are better, hoping the next game Techland releases has Linux support.
Not quite. The water is atrocious in the distance (static and pixelated), but it's not a Linux issue. It's the same on Windows and PS4. I'd say, everything is kinda pixelated in the distance but considering the huge open world nature of the game this is forgivable. Faces are less detailed than in RotTR and I barely remember any good face expressions in the cutscenes, maybe a couple in "The Following".

Don't get me wrong, DL is a wonderful game and I completed it and the DLC twice, the second time with friends. It has a perfect hot summer atmosphere, it's vast, has the most dramatic story for a zombie game (which is a compliment I guess?). I think it captures the feeling of "being" the character the best because of parkour and great camera dynamics. I remember the nausea in one of the first missions where you should climb the towers to fix the transmitters, I was genuinely scared of falling down!

And I certainly would love to have the next Techland game available on Linux. But the performance is nowhere near the RotTR's, I have 40-45 FPS when everything is at max and it was about 10 FPS at launch with glitches and such. They even had to cut some graphical features to make it barely playable. The FPS is also not stable. So, in my opinion, RotTR still wins. Just take the most beautiful screenshots in DL and in RotTR and compare them yourself!
rkfg Apr 21, 2018
As of today, this game shows the best graphics available on Linux, in all imaginable aspects, period.
This uses Vulkan btw, which is perhaps why you haven't noticed any micro stuttering on cutscenes like in some other games.. I'm certaintely glad it uses Vulkan, my CPU is the bottleneck now since recently upgrading my graphics card
Definitely. I need to check the CPU load on this one. The main upsides of Vulkan are graphical multithreading and the ability to optimize the GPU usage closely to the hardware. Basically, you can write your own videodriver for each game/engine that pushes the hardware to the limit. Before it was a guess game from both the GPU driver vendor and the game dev sides, both were trying to hit the fast path as often as possible (hence the driver updates for each new AAA title that have guesses and fixes for a particular game). Now the game devs are almost the GPU driver devs as well. And finally they can do rendering on all available cores instead of kicking the dying single threaded state machine that is OpenGL.
lucifertdark Apr 21, 2018
I went from unsupported distro & supported drivers to supported on both & the crashing problem has increased in speed, going from every 5 minutes to every 2 minutes. While it works it looks amazing though.

Their support is usually excellent, especially once you are using their supported distributions and drivers. Please raise a support ticket.
I think I'm going to hold off pestering their support for the moment, after downgrading to the 390 drivers the crash has gone & I've just spent over an hour running round the Croft Manor without a single crash or hiccup with the graphics set to Medium.
jens Apr 21, 2018
  • Supporter
I went from unsupported distro & supported drivers to supported on both & the crashing problem has increased in speed, going from every 5 minutes to every 2 minutes. While it works it looks amazing though.

Their support is usually excellent, especially once you are using their supported distributions and drivers. Please raise a support ticket.
I think I'm going to hold off pestering their support for the moment, after downgrading to the 390 drivers the crash has gone & I've just spent over an hour running round the Croft Manor without a single crash or hiccup with the graphics set to Medium.

Did you noticed any difference except stability between both driver versions, like something visual or performance? I'm using 390.48 without any apparent issue too. I'm wondering why Feral states the beta drivers is the minimum requirement.
lucifertdark Apr 21, 2018
Did you noticed any difference except stability between both driver versions, like something visual or performance? I'm using 390.48 without any apparent issue too. I'm wondering why Feral states the beta drivers is the minimum requirement.
I'm not too sure, the beta drivers don't give me enough time to stop & look around before crashing to desktop, I did notice a random momentary freeze on the menu every time there's lightning with the beta drivers that's not happening on the earlier drivers.
tuubi Apr 21, 2018
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  • Supporter Plus
I've had the game suddenly crawl for a good ten seconds a couple of times when I'm running to a new area on 390.48, I'd assume compiling shaders. Maybe the new shader compiler would help there?
Jahimself Apr 21, 2018
As of today, this game shows the best graphics available on Linux, in all imaginable aspects, period.

Definitly not:
Hitman, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Metro Last Light, and even Mad Max looks better than RoTR.

It's way too pixelated, and any "correct" antialiasing requires way too much ressource, and has almost no effect. If you look where the game tries to make you not look at, you should quickly realise textures are poor. If you put the camera only a little away from lara's face, you can see how much pixelated it is (even with smaax4 and texture in very high).
Water and vegetation looks blurry.

Most of technique used by Crystal Dynamics are lighting techniques which looks shiny but hide those defaults and are completely non realistic.


The game tries to look good, but it definitely does not looks good. It plays with camera angle or cut scene to give illusion of nice graphics, but it can't be compared to some older titles with nice graphics.


Last edited by Jahimself on 21 April 2018 at 6:48 pm UTC
mahagr Apr 21, 2018
I also think that the main reason to use beta drivers is to avoid those long breaks when loading the game and between witching the areas. Beta drivers seem to work fine, except of Tomb Raider 2013 doesn't seem to work for me anymore.

That said I'm really surprised how smoothly RotTR game runs in 4K compared to older Feral titles (except the oldest ones). The game looks really good with everything maxed out and is still all smooth and playable with frame rates almost never dropping below 30 FPS with GTX 1080. Also even that lowest ~30 FPS feels really smooth with almost no micro shuttering and jumps (which seem to be issue especially in Deus Ex even in 1080p and 60 FPS). As I said before, usually my frame rate seems to stay between 40-50 FPS, sometimes even staying at solid 60 FPS, which is all great with G-Sync monitor (and the game not being a shooter).

I'm already loving Vulkan; being able to use all those cores really seems to make a huge difference in Linux.
Ketil Apr 21, 2018
This game is super pretty on very high preset graphics, and it runs great on my computer at the same time:) I like that in a game.
drlamb Apr 21, 2018
Definitly not:

![](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/tPvbV4OfLbgcERXPv722tqo9FVQYUwAewJeWW2EoGDMpvg-8TcnGvvHJGWLrrByAa0jxB6753tZHwBDVTpFo7oTyM_6Zcbf9Lnf3RTQeDmdWcltNlf3s1DvGSg6kPSUD3kQFdA89)

Can't we just agree that we all have different opinions of what looks good and enjoy the game? That's what I'm doing.
Jahimself Apr 22, 2018
I'm talking on technical aspect of the game, not about design or personal feeling.

this game shows the best graphics available on Linux, in all imaginable aspects, period.

The game certainly does not shows the best graphic on linux (Even if the cutscenes gives this illusion)

You can't do nothing about it because it's in the way its shaders has been designed. It can't be improved by any sort of AA even with SSAA. It requires huge resolution to look decent, and even with 4K and ssaa x4 (equivalent of 16K) people complain about jaggies (it appears on every 3D and 2D sprites).

If you watch closely you should see texturing even in very high is nothing spectacular. It's not specific to linux version which looks the same as on windows.
D34VA_ Apr 22, 2018
I'm talking on technical aspect of the game, not about design or personal feeling.

this game shows the best graphics available on Linux, in all imaginable aspects, period.

The game certainly does not shows the best graphic on linux (Even if the cutscenes gives this illusion)

You can't do nothing about it because it's in the way its shaders has been designed. It can't be improved by any sort of AA even with SSAA. It requires huge resolution to look decent, and even with 4K and ssaa x4 (equivalent of 16K) people complain about jaggies (it appears on every 3D and 2D sprites).

If you watch closely you should see texturing even in very high is nothing spectacular. It's not specific to linux version which looks the same as on windows.

Obviously, the person meant that this is the best looking game they've seen that is currently available for Linux... No need to be so pedantic.


Last edited by D34VA_ on 22 April 2018 at 3:45 am UTC
Jahimself Apr 22, 2018
Sorry but I'm not used on PC to have such jaggies.
Certainly cut scenes looks excellent, but the game itself does not.

Nvidia screenshots are reduced in size which make it look better than what it is. If you look at SSAAx4 vs no AA, you can see it has almost not effect, while it is supposed to increase resolution by X4.

Any AA used in the game works poorly as it's due to bad port from console to PC. SMAA is worst than FXAA, SSAAx2/x4 create blur instead of sharpness.
It's just sad as the game could have looked really excellent if it was to the level of the cutscenes.

Honestly DeadEndTHrills can make any game look a lot better than how it is in real condition. I mean not everyone has the hardware of Ben Salman's sons.

I don't understand how you can disagree on that, you have your own eyes to see.
Dunc Apr 22, 2018
Hitman, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Metro Last Light, and even Mad Max looks better than RoTR.
Those are all good-looking games, and I can't directly comment on RoTR yet (although the original reboot looked pretty darned good to me), but one thing that really puzzled me about Mankind Divided was why it was so heavy on system resources considering the quality of its graphics. It can look great, don't misunderstand me, but it absolutely doesn't look anything like as good as Hitman, Metro, or TR on the settings I'm forced to run it at here.
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