 Welcome to our Tomb Raider, not the old Tomb Raider, the new Tomb Raider that has the exact same title as the old Tomb Raider. Welcome to our Tomb Raider GPU Showdown Performance Guide. We are going to be taking four different price points and comparing cards from the green team and the red team and letting you guys know which one is the best for your hard-earned dollar in this particular game. New Tomb Raider, not old Tomb Raider. Now as always, we're going to start with a look at our test bench. We have a 3960X at 4 GHz, so it's overclocked, but quite frankly, a 3770K or 3570K is going to perform better than that once you overclock it to the max. Anyhow, 16 gigs of Kingston HyperX memory and ASUS P9X79 Deluxe. We obviously swap out the graphics cards. We've got an Antec High-Current Pro 1000 watt power supply, 128 gig SSD for our boot drive, and it's all cooled by a Corsair H100. Now, since the CPU is overclocked and because everyone and their dog tests graphics cards at their stock speeds, we overclock every graphics card on our test bench because we think you guys should be overclocking your graphics cards too and we want to represent what you will be able to achieve with your card. So we're going for fairly realistic overclocks on our cards and you can check out the annotation if you want to see exactly what settings we're running so you can try and replicate them on your own cards. We are not using the built-in benchmark for Tomb Raider. We are actually using a two-minute run-through the same way that we normally do and if you want to check out our two-minute run-through, you can follow along with Slick's testing methodology video which he creates every time we do one of these showdowns and you can benchmark your system against ours. Now, while we understand the importance of rating graphics cards based on frame times as opposed to just frame rates, we don't have the equipment yet to do that so we're sticking with our old methodology of using fraps to record frame rates and reporting the results. It may not be perfect but it's as good as anything anyone else has been recording for the last five years anyway so hopefully it still gives you some guidance in terms of how these cards compare to each other. In our $100 price range, we've got the 7770 and the GTX 650. Now, these cards were run at ultimate which is the same settings we ran everything else at and if you think about that for a moment, $100 card versus $400 card at the same settings is quite possible you're going to end up with a situation where it's not really even playable on these cards. The 7770 in particular did not perform very well on ultimate. However, because both of these cards just tanked with TressFX on, we decided to run at ultra instead of ultimate just to give you guys a look at what you might actually be playing at. So the only real difference between ultra and ultimate is that ultra does not have TressFX which is the realistic hair simulation that's going on in this game. The funny thing is TressFX is an AMD technology but it actually runs better on the 650 than the 7770 even though neither of them are playable at all. So let's move into our next price bracket which is about $200. So our 660 is about $29 and our 7870 is about $239 making them sort of closer to $250 but this is a very good value price point and so that's why we want to bring this up. The 7870 did win by about 10% versus the 660 so there you go. I guess there's not really much else to say because Tomb Raider benchmarked very smoothly other than the hiccups that were encountered on the lower end, on the lower end cards where with TressFX it didn't seem to really want to work at all. 7950 continues to be a rock star in our testing. It overclocks incredibly well and particularly when it came to minimum frame rates versus the 660 Ti it performed about 50% better on minimums. 48 FPS versus 30 FPS on the 660 Ti. So that was a bit of a trouncing because remember guys minimum frame rates are more important to the overall gaming experience than average frame rates necessarily can be. In our final price bracket, so we've gone $100, $200, $300 and now $400 we've got the GTX 670 and the Radeon 7970. So it's not a GHz edition card but quite frankly it doesn't really matter because it doesn't, you can overclock the card yourself anyway but we see another victory for the red team this time again by about 10% and I guess it makes sense because this is an AMD sort of gaming evolved title. They are giving it away with their cards in their never settle bundles or at least they have depending on when you're watching this video and I think that pretty much wraps it up. So thank you for checking out this video on Tomb Raider, not old Tomb Raider, new Tomb Raider. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.