Crystal Dynamics is still hard at work on action spectacular Rise of the Tomb Raider and seems to be putting unusual care into Lara's PC performance. Just last Tuesday Peter 'Durante' Thoman was lamenting the abundance of broken PC ports, but Tomb Raider is distancing itself from the herd with a slew of esoteric graphics options and improved SLI support. No, not abandoned—improved.
There are fixes for a lot of specific circumstances, but the standout entries include:
- Improved NVIDIA SLI performance. (Steam only)
- Fixed SLI glitches during water/snow effects. (Steam only)
- Resolution Modifier option that allows you to use a lower rendering resolution independent from window size when running in windowed mode.
- Fixed an issue that could rarely lead to an error on machines with 16 hardware threads or more.
- New graphics option 'Specular Reflection Quality' to enhance resolution and reduce aliasing of specular reflections, at some performance cost.
- New graphics option to disable film-grain independently from 'Screen Effects'.
- Improved HBAO+ quality, including better occlusion for distant objects.
- Fixed major stuttering in Endurance mode.
- Warning messages for users turning textures to Very High or enabling SSAA to indicate high-end hardware is required.
Rise of the Tomb Raider is an absolute beast to run at its highest settings, but starts looking beautiful long before you get there. I love to see devs enabling unnecessary enthusiast options 'because PC', future-proofing their games and spawning the likes of but-can-it-run-Crysis in-jokes. Nothing like a bit of healthy oneupmanship in the tech industry.
Full patch notes here.
