Shadow of the Tomb Raider – Graphics Settings Guide

Graphics Settings

Switching to the Graphics tab lets you change graphical features. You are given 5 presets for easy setup: Lowest, Low, Medium, High, Highest.

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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