TR demo performance

Demo has a lot of slowdowns here and there, is it the way the game is or is it just my 360?

I hope that the finished product isn't like this, as I HATE games that don't have consistent frame rates. I'll download it this weekend and see if it's just you, or everyone.

Have you played the PC demo? Is the Xbox 360 demo the same as the PC demo? I played the PC demo and really enjoyed it. I'll attempt to download the Xbox 360 demo this weekend as well and let you know how it runs.

Another Tomb Raider......I lost interest at number 2 for the PlayStation. I don't think the series will ever be good again.

lesman said:

Another Tomb Raider......I lost interest at number 2 for the PlayStation. I don't think the series will ever be good again.

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I stopped after #2 as well, but will definately be picking this game up. Nothing better than playing with a hottie like Laura Croft as she goes back to her roots. I'm definately going to pick up this game, unless there are major frame rate issues.

zero002021 said:

Have you played the PC demo? Is the Xbox 360 demo the same as the PC demo? I played the PC demo and really enjoyed it. I'll attempt to download the Xbox 360 demo this weekend as well and let you know how it runs.

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Sadly, the demo ran super smooth on my rig at 1920x1200, although the "next-gen" graphics weren't enabled, but I don't think it would have made a huge impact.

The 360 demo did look very vivid. But the framemate was truly disappointing, unless of course, my 360 wasn't running at maximum efficiency.

Yea, I notice the same thing. I played the demo on the PC and the 360 and the 360 version seemed to chug. It made camera placement and lining up jumps a little difficult.

I hope someone can compare the finished version to the demo because I had fun with it. Reminded me of playing the first Tomb Raider.

I just downloaded the demo, and the frame rates in the game SUCK ASS. I'm sorry, but they need to do a better job than this. In high definition, the frame rates are even worse than Quake 4 at times(if that's even possible). The inconsistent frame rates are ruining the playbility of this game as you mentioned, because it becomes hard to line up jumps and stunts just right. There is also no indication that you've shot your enemies in this game. They don't bleed, or even recoil from the blow. It makes it really hard to know if you've even shot them with the gun. If they did this to try to be PC and family friendly, screw them. I think i'm going to wait as i'm not sure if this game is worth my hard earned $60. Besides, no incentive to go out and buy a game when i've put 94 hours into Oblivion, without even touching the maint quest. Oblivion is definately going to require 250+ hours from me. I seem to recall that in an interview, they said that Tomb Raider will run at 30fps. I don't know what they were smoking, because the frame rates really take a dive, and can be a slideshow in certain spots.

Now people are playing the final version on PC it seems like all the "next-gen" effects are what's chugging the system. Pepple aren't able to get good FPS on their PC if they leave those effects on either.

Demo ran great on my xbox360. Only noticed one small slow down when I spun around fast and the brush I was close too got zoomed in on with the waterfall and water reflections in the backround. FPS was probably in the high teens for a second or 2. Nothing that really affect game play though. Plus, I think the system doesn't run full speed in demos. Atleast the fans don't spin up to full speed with my xbox360 while playing downloaded content. Game looks great and is fun. I will probably pick it up later or rent it. Busy with GRAW right now. Using my 19inch LCD right now, so maybe slow downs are less noticable on smaller screens?

Are you using a VGA cable, and at what resolution are you running the game in? A friend of mine just ran Tomb Raider demo via a VGA cable on his 17 inch Samsung LCD at 1024x768 and got much better frame rates than i'm getting in 720P on my HDTV.

junehhan said:

Are you using a VGA cable, and at what resolution are you running the game in? A friend of mine just ran Tomb Raider demo via a VGA cable on his 17 inch Samsung LCD at 1024x768 and got much better frame rates than i'm getting in 720P on my HDTV.

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Yes, I am using VGA cables, but at 1280x1024 with my 19inch LCD.

I haven't been able to download the demo, it gets to 5% and goes nowhere, tried downloading many, many times. Stupid wireless.

Maybe once some reviews get out we'll find out whats up with the game. Hopefully it's only the demo that's got slowdown problems and not the full game. IGN reviewed it, they didn't complain about much slowdown, but they're IGN, and well, yeah... I'll wait for GameSpot's word.

the game chugs like mofo in 1080i and 720p, but it is smooth in 480i. So if you have a hdtv, err, set your xbox360 to 480i.
O_O

It ran "okay" for me, but slower than I'd like. I wasn't particularly impressed. I haven't really enjoyed the Tomb Raider even since the early ones. Now that we've got games like Ninja Gaiden that offer all of the technique at 5X the speed and framerate...Tomb Raider feels antiquated.
Now that MS finally patched and fixed Ninja Gaiden's performance on the 360, anyone who wants this game should look to that game instead. On the 360 it looks better than this native game.

Qwerty said:

the game chugs like mofo in 1080i and 720p, but it is smooth in 480i. So if you have a hdtv, err, set your xbox360 to 480i.
O_O

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If MS' rules are followed, the box renders all games internally at 720p and then up/downscales, regardless of your output selection... shouldn't this be the case as well? You should get the same fps whether your box is going 1080i or 480p, unless more rules have been broken.

didn't notice any slowdowns at all. ran smooth and framerates never dropped.

full auto demo on the other hand...............

steviep said:

If MS' rules are followed, the box renders all games internally at 720p and then up/downscales, regardless of your output selection... shouldn't this be the case as well? You should get the same fps whether your box is going 1080i or 480p, unless more rules have been broken.

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I don't think that's true at all. Quake 4 is a good example of this. If you play Quake 4 on an HDTV, the frame rates are just plain bad. However, when they were played using a VGA cable at 1024x768, or at 480p, the frame rates were liquid smooth on my friend's setup.

Tombraider demo really really chugs when running high definition at 720p. However, when being run on a friend's setup using LCD cables at a lower resolution, the frame rates were better.

Hmm interesting. I was under the impression that the box renders everything at 720p and then adjusts the aspect ratio during the output phase. Perhaps I read wrong. I do hate jumpy framerates, however... one of my big pet peeves.

steveip,

I read the same thing, from various sources....renders everything internally at 720p...so frames shouldn't change regardless of resolution.

It makes sense to do it that way??? I'd be surprised if they didn't because frame rates can vary a lot for people running 480p vs. 13xx x whatever (the higest vga output res)

I played the demo and it was fun, actually I was planning on getting it, but reviews say that it's kinda short so I may just rent it... When I played the demo I didn't notice any FPS drops, but then again I was looking for the fun factor not the FPS drop, but I guess if FPS would drop I would notice it.

I have no idea where this whole "all resolutions are upscaled/downscaled and are therfore the same" info from MS came from, but I don't buy it. Either it's them BS'ing or they're cheating in some games...or the Xbox is simply inconsistant in the same games over and over.
In almost every game you'll notice DRAMTIC changes in the 3 resolutions on the 360. This is especially true when comparing 480p and 1080i. Pop in a game like Full-Auto (that has chaos and bog-down points galore) and it's painfully obvious that they run the game differently. In particularly 480p tends to run games at a higher framerate, but eats it visually.
I'm not even sold that 720p and 1080i run the game identically either. When I was figuring out which I liked better, I noticed all kinds of crazy variations and bog-down points that varied between the two.

Perhaps it is game-dependant... or the more likely case is that 1080i is upscaled, and when you go lower, it renders at lower resolutions? If I wasn't so lazy, I'd dig up the links... but it has been suggested in many many places that everything (except PGR3) was rendered at 720p internally and then scaled to the alternate resolutions as per your selection in the dashboard.

Steviep,

I didn't believe that it would matter, resolution as compared to framerate since I had read otherwise. I tested it tonight with my projector and TR. I don't know about other games because I haven't tried them yet, but it certaintly does make a difference in at least this demo.....the differences are very noticable....... this is a disappointment to me and I hope its not standard fare.

I typically play at 1280x720 (720p) my projectors native resolution using the VGA adapter component cables....TR demo played slower than my PC I'm guessing about 20-30 FPS, it wasn't a dog and was still totally playable to me, the slowdown areas never got so obnoxious as to ruin the controls, but it was noticably a bit stuttery.....The water looked better on the xbox, but Laura looked better on my PC, in fact I couldn't even tell that Laura was wet when she got out of the water, and on my PC she's dripping wet, and obviously wet visually. My PC is a 4ghz p4 with 6800GT, 1GB RAM - all options maxed, the xbox360 has no graphic options to select.

I swapped the xbox 360 resolution to 640 x 480 and reloaded the demo. It ran smooth as silk and as smooth as my PC does, there were no slowdown areas.

So as much as I hate to see this- it seems to be true, with at least this game, the Xbox360 renders at whatever resolution you choose. Meaning for FPS games you could probably be more competitve at the lower resolutions.

Interesting stuff, Archea. Thanks for clarifying and debunking what you and I have both read. So much for the "HD era" monicker, though... it seems a common occurence to have <30fps on titles that are rendering in HD, at least from personal experience on some of the games that I've played, and reading a lot of the opinions on this very forum about various other titles. On the plus side, as the years go by, developers will make better tools that will make the in-order cores easier to use and therefore make their titles less prone to all of these framerate problems - especially the cross-platform ports

When they say the game is "short" how many hours is it? I really don't care, but I'd like to know how short is short for a game like this? If it's 10 hours, great for me, worth the 50 bucks... or 60... I forget what I paid.

Thanks Archea for clearing that up. Disappointing, to say the least about the resolutions. I wonder if its going to be the same deal with the final game, i'm guessing it will be.

I haven't noticed anything like this in any of my other games. Only other instance was the Full Auto Demo. The only thing I can see in common are both are demo's, but I doubt that has much to do with anything.

Archaea said:

TR demo played slower than my PC I'm guessing about 20-30 FPS, it wasn't a dog and was still totally playable to me, the slowdown areas never got so obnoxious as to ruin the controls, but it was noticably a bit stuttery.....The water looked better on the xbox, but Laura looked better on my PC, in fact I couldn't even tell that Laura was wet when she got out of the water, and on my PC she's dripping wet, and obviously wet visually. My PC is a 4ghz p4 with 6800GT, 1GB RAM - all options maxed, the xbox360 has no graphic options to select.

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Archaea, the one thing here that you don't mention is that the pc demo does not have any next gen effects available. You are therefore playing a ps2 level game in higher resolution. It will obviously run at a higher fps. My pc (6800gt) runs the demo at 75fps or higher at all times because of that, but in the full game with nextgen options enabled, the framerate barely ever breaks thirty and stays mostly around 10fps in large areas, making the game completely unplayable. This is at 640x480 resolution. Also, the next gen renders "wet" Lara differently, and your description makes it seem like you didn't have next gen on. I just didn't want people thinking the pc version runs better than the 360 when in fact, the next gen options are practically broken on the pc they run so poorly.

I still have hope for the HD era after playing Oblivion. Tomb Raider might've been a sloppy port and some of the earlier games were made on really early dev kits. I still have hope but believe the hype - not all resolutions perform the same in every game.

Papa Geo

you are right about the PC demo not having next gen.....(it's grayed out & not selectable)

But I must say, in my exp. thus far....(i''ve played the demo completely through on both xbox360 & PC)

(great demo by the way)

I much prefer the controls on the Xbox360 (it's very intuative)
but the visuals on the PC demo.

The water drips/splashes/flies in all directions off laura in the pc demo, and her body glistens with the wetness - you can easily tell she just got out of the water.

In the xbox360 demo I couldn't even tell she had just gotten out of the water. Everything did look a bit softer on the xbox360 demo, and perhaps thats the next gen effect, (the water looks nicer without actually being in it) but outside of that I couldn't tell much difference. I actually think the PC demo would look quite a bit better if hooked up to my projector in the same rez as in comparison.

I don't say this to bash xbox360. I really love the console, if you review my posts, you'll notice that most every single thing I say about the 360 is positive, and with good reason. It's a great system. I just think this game maybe a better play on the PC.


THAT BEING SAID. Because I have a 100" projection screen with an HDTV projector, with my very nice audio/subwoofer setup -----and the frame rates on the 360 are still QUITE playable in my mind, AND the controls are better with the 360 controller over a mouse and keyboard. I would probably pick up the xbox360 version over the PC version. But if my PC was hooked up permantly to my projector...I'm gonna have to say I would go with the PC version.

I think this game is sorta in the same leaue as perfect dark zero as far as framerates (at least juding by the demo) on the xbox. Framerates are a bit "off"

And that bothers me because at this point in the game ---- EVERYTHING should be as impressive as Fight Night Round 3, or Kameo. This is the point in the product cycle that this console should be whooping my PC's rear in EVERY single game cause in 3 years when the game developers have figured out how to code or whateverf, my PC's going to kill anything available for the 360.........Same as my PC kills original Xbox titles now. They really have made the original xbox system run some impressive titles, HL2 being one of the most impressive. BUT, you know, it still doesn't even hold a candle to a half way decent PC, so in my mind....NOW, not three years from now, is the time for this Xbox360 to shine, and int this game.....I'm just a bit disappointed.

Seems to me like they maybe should have worked a bit harder to make it shine more on the console.


All that being said....this is only the demo, and the full game will hopefully make ammends to these shortcomings. I think I will buy it....The demo makes it seem like quite a bit of fun regardless.

Archaea,
Oh, I know you weren't bashing the 360, just wanted to let you know about the nextgen effects, and if you at all like them, the game should not be purchased on the pc, as it appears to be very poorly coded to perform good. Also, I agree with you on the Lara looking better on the pc, as on the 360 her face can have some interesting looks, but i think it's because of the self-shadowing, etc. Overall, I would rather play the game in next gen mode on my pc because the shadows/lighting looks more impressive, but unfortunately that is impossible and am glad that it still looks very good as an xbox/ps2 style game in high res. i also agree about pc gaming being superior with the right pc,however, when a new console is released, it motivates devs to actually strive for a better "nextgen" looking game, whereas when a new gfx card comes out, there is no pressure to do more because to them only a small fraction of the pc gaming population will be able to utilize it. that's why i love new console releases, now instead of xbox ports to pc, we get 360 ports to pc. for instance brothers in arms had some very intriguing gameplay additions, and i looked forward to it on pc, since my xbox's gfx were aging, but when it came out, all i got was a high-res xbox game. now with the screens for the new bia showing up, it will finally have the graphical effort put into it the that the game deserved from the beginning.

I'm with Archaea.
Considering how impressive some games are on the 360...it's bizzare how so-so others are.
I guess the Oblivion guys claim to be the first to use the architechture properly and that game is as next-gen as it gets. I'm hoping that in the upcoming months we'll see a lot more games like that (visually) and a lot fewer Full Autos.

Framerate bugged me in the demo too. By the time I got myself settled into the full TR game, I was all up in the Lara to notice here...um...accents not updating at 60fps.

Since my migration from PC to 360, I've notice one very large difference. Due to the inability to "tweak" it, I enjoy and now value gameplay over framerate.