Shadow of the Tomb Raider – How to Improve The Performance

How to Improve The Performance

Target settings for different specifications

First of all, please keep in mind our targets with minimum and recommended specs:

At minimum spec (Windows 7 64 bit, i3-3220 INTEL or AMD Equivalent, 8 GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 660/GTX 1050 or AMD Radeon HD 7770) we recommend LOW settings at 30 fps/720p.

At recommended spec (Windows 10 64-bit, Intel Core i7 4770K 3.40 Ghz or AMD Ryzen 5 1600 3.20 Ghz, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB or AMD Radeon RX 480 8GB) we recommend HIGH settings at an average of 60 fps/1080p.

We also offer a Very High preset aimed at users well above recommended spec or those who wish to trade framerate for image quality. When at or close to recommended spec, even if you cannot use the Very High preset entirely, you are invited to experiment with individual settings at their highest quality and see if some of the features are still suitable for your system.

Display

The first Options screen to check should always be the Display tab. It includes the following options:

DirectX 12: Set this to ON to make use of our recommended graphics API for better performance and usage of latest hardware features. Only available for Windows 10 OS systems. Setting this to OFF will let the game run on DirectX 11 API.

Resolution: Higher resolutions can cost a lot of GPU power, and performance will often scale proportionally to the resolution. Especially close to minimum spec it may be worth it to run at a lower resolution while maintaining a higher graphics quality level.

Exclusive Fullscreen: Enable this to change the refresh rate.

Resolution Modifier: Selectable when playing in Windowed Mode. Gradually degrades the internal resolution for rendering. Affects framerate.

VSync: VSync synchronizes the rate at which new frames are provided to the screen by the game, preventing tearing.

Anti-Aliasing: Techniques to smooth out geometry edges.

• -SMAA is a simple but effective solution that smoothes most edges at a low cost.

• -TAA also handles temporal aliasing artifacts like specular aliasing. It is our recommended option for most users.

• -SMAAT2X combines TAA and SMAA for a higher quality yet more expensive result.

• -SMAA4x is the highest quality AA option that also uses multi-sampling, increasing visual fidelity and detail, but take a lot of GPU power. Only use this when you have plenty of hardware power available relative to the resolution you are running at.

HDR: Enables HDR color output on supported operating systems and displays. HDR is only supported on Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (1709) or higher. To make the HDR option available HDR must be enabled in Windows display settings.

Additionally, the game features support for:

• -3D stereoscopic display

• -Multi monitor usage & 21:9 monitor resolution support.

• -SLI or CrossFire MultiGPU setups in DX12. For best stability, please ensure you are running the latest Steam Beta client. This client has fixes that resolve stability issues with the Steam overlay and MultiGPU setups.

Graphics

Switching to the Graphics tab lets you change graphical features. You are given 5 presets for easy setup: Lowest, Low, Medium, High, Highest. For recommended systems, we recommend the ‘high’ graphics preset to start with. Changing any feature will set the preset to ‘custom’.

Texture Quality: High Quality filtering improves texture quality when viewing surfaces at an angle. Lower quality can improve performance.

Texture filtering: Used in conjunction with Texture Quality.

Shadow Quality: Higher quality adds more detail to the shadows, producing a more realistic transition between shadowed and non-shadowed areas. Lowering quality reduces the cost on the GPU. Completely turning off shadows significantly improves performance on systems with a slower CPUs and GPUs, but at a major loss of visual fidelity. This is advised for systems below or barely at the minimum hardware requirements for the game.

Ambient Occlusion: Ambient Occlusion darkens creases and corners in the game to add depth.

• -BTAO was developed by Eidos Montreal and offers a great visual improvement for limited cost.

• -HBAO+ was developed by NVIDIA and is a more expensive but even better-looking option.

Depth of Field: Simulates the effect of a camera which will only have a certain part of the view in focus. In Normal mode it is primarily used in cinematics, and when set to High also foreground objects during gameplay are out of focus when appropriate.

Level of Detail: Higher Quality increases the distance at which objects fade to a lower detail level. Lower quality decreases this distance, improving GPU performance. Due to far away objects not rendering at all at lower quality it can also significantly impact CPU performance.

Tessellation: Tessellation adds more detail to select surfaces by subdividing geometry and applying displacement maps. Disable to increase performance.

Bloom: Allows bright spots on the screen to bleed light onto the surrounding area. Disable to improve performance slightly.

Motion Blur: Makes movement appear smoother by blurring geometry along the direction it is moving. Disable to improve performance.

Screen Space Reflections: Enables reflections that are created by ray-marching into the on-screen image. Disable to improve GPU performance.

Screen Space Contact Shadows: Generate additional sharp shadows on surfaces close to casters by ray-marching into the on-screen image. Enable to improve shadow accuracy. Higher modes are more expensive on the GPU.

PureHair: PureHair is a high-end hair rendering solution that renders and simulates individual strands of hair on the GPU. Lowering quality improves performance especially on weaker graphics cards.

Volumetric Lighting: Volumetric lighting creates realistic beams of light as light passes through damp or dusty environments. They can be disabled for improved GPU performance.

Lens flares: Enable to allow bright lights to create internal reflection and scattering artifacts as if viewed through a camera lens.

Screen effects: Disable to remove screen effects such as blood and dirt on the camera.

The graphics menu has the largest number of options for you to adjust. Be advised that while the performance of each individual one is limited having them all turned up together can severely impact frame rate when the hardware is not up to the task.

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