Rise of the Tomb Raider is coming to the PC in January but what is news to everyone is that it's going to be bundled with NVIDIA GeForce 970 & 980 GPUs. After being advertised for so long as a title including AMD Gaming Evolved features, it is interesting to see it being bundled in with a NVIDIA card.
In the latest emails to NVIDIA subscribers a voucher for the game will come with certain GPU starting on the 7th of January. The cards that will be included in this bundle are the GTX970, GTX980, GTX980Ti desktop GPU, GTX970M, GTX980M, and GTX980.
One of the big angles that AMD was using in its advertisement of Rise of the Tomb Raider was its utilization of the TressFX 3.0 system to provide a way for GPU to handle hair, fur, and grass better than ever before. Rise of the Tomb Raider will be the first game to use TressFX 3.0, and the next title that will use it s Deus Ex: Mankind Divided that will be releasing later this year. The competitor to TressFX is NVIDIA's Hairworks but there has been no word on whether that or any other NVIDIA GameWorks features will be coming to Rise of the Tomb Raider.
Due to the differences in AMD and NVIDIA controlling their game enhancements anyone who buys one of these cards, or already owns a NVIDIA card, will be able to use TressFX which is easier to adapt drivers for due to the code being available to read online. We have seen cases of the flip side though where NVIDIA GameWorks can run on AMD cards but due to the proprietary nature of the code there is generally a greater performance loss.
Rise of the Tomb Raider will be hitting PC in January after its release last year on the Xbox One. It's first content focused DLC, Endurance Mode, recently came out, and if you'd like more information on the game then you can also read our review.
What do you think of NVIDIA bundling Rise of the Tomb Raider? Have you been looking for an upgrade recently? Are you planning on getting Rise of the Tomb Raider?
