The remarkable reboot by Crystal Dynamics also made an appearance on PC. The game was received well by the fans and managed to secure a respectable place in critics’ reviews.
Tomb Raider is not really a console port and hence can be tweaked in different ways. You can use these tweaks to boost performance, fix small issues and customize different features as per your own needs. With that said, let’s move on to various tweaks you can do:
Note: Both Nvidia and AMD released beta drivers to optimize the performance of Tomb Raider. It’s recommended that you download these drivers first before applying playing with custom variables / tweaks.
Tomb Raider 2013 PC Tweaks
How to Force the Game to run on Directx 9
If you don’t have a high end PC, and you want to boost performance compromising graphics a bit, it’s a recommended tweak. Latest GPUs these days will run the game in Directx 11 mode by default, but if you want to run the game on DX 9, these are the steps you need to follow:
You need to open your REG editor. You can do it by opening start menu and typing “regedit”. Hit enter and the registry editor will pop up. On the left side of the opened window, follow this path:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Crystal Dynamics\Tomb Raider\Graphics
You need to change the Render API value to 9 on the right side. If you want to switch back, go to the same place and enter 0.
Tomb Raider 2013 – How to Fix Flickering
If your screen is flickering (which can be annoying), you can do the following to avoid it:
- Turn off the V-sync through launcher settings.
- If that doesn’t help, try turning off the tessellation setting.
Tomb Raider 2013 – How to Fix the Sound Issue
If you are having unpleasant sound in the game, you should do the following:
- Try updating the sound card drivers.
- Otherwise, try disabling the hardware acceleration of your sound card. To do this: go to control panel and then move to Sound & Audio/Audio Tab/Advanced/Performance. Here, you should move the slider to none.
Tomb Raider 2013 – Benchmark Commands
You can use the following command line parameters to initiate the benchmark before starting the game:
-benchmark
-benchmarkini “filename.ini”
The first command will start the benchmark on start-up and quit the game once it’s finished. The second parameter will initiate on start-up, and after it’s complete, it will not only exit; it will also create an ini file that will contain overrides for quality settings.
Tomb Raider 2013 – Avoid Button Mashing by Using Macros
If game’s QTEs are annoying for you, and you want to avoid button mashing repeatedly, you can make use of your mouse/keyboard macros. Each software for the respective hardware will have different settings so you will have to experiment a bit. While setting up keys, you should keep the delay time to 20ms.
Tomb Raider 2013 – How to Adjust Field of View (FOV)
The game being a third person does not require any FOV increment. However, if you still want it, you can do so by using the registry editor. Open the registry editor (How? Refer to first point) and head to the following location:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Crystal Dynamics\Tomb Raider\Graphics
You can have a broader view by altering the aspect ration slightly. The default formula for calculating FOV is:
Monitor width/Monitor Heightx10000
You can add slightly to your (e.g 880+200) width to have a broader view. Once you have selected your FOV, insert that value into Aspectration option in the editor. The change in aspect ratio can result in distorted image so try not to be extravagant with this.
Tomb Raider 2013 – INI File Tweaks
There is plethora of options that you can change by modifying the .ini files. The common things of interest are:
Fullscreen
This option will help you to enable (1) or disable (0) the full screen mode.
FullscreenWidth
It will define the width of resolution in pixels.
QualityLevel
You can change the setting from 0 to 4 with 0 being minimum and 4 being the max. Try to lower the quality level if you want to improve FPS.
FullscreenHeight
It will define height of resolution in pixels.
FullscreenRefreshRate
It will define screen refresh rate in Hz.
StereoEnabled
You can enable or disable steroscopic support using this option. If your sound is being distorted, you should keep it disabled.
TextureQuality
Defines the texture quality (0-4).
VSyncMode
If you set the value to 2, you will enable it with tripple buffer. Set it to 0 if you want it to stay disabled.
ReflectionQuality
Reflection quality can be set to High by setting this option to 3.
BestTextureFilter
If you set the value to +2 upto 18, you will get Anisotropic level filtering.
SSAOMode
The graphical option eats up some resources so it’s recommended that if you are struggling with FPS, try disabling it.
DOFQuality
You will be able to define depth of field using this option (range 0-3).
LODBias
The option will define the level of detail Bias (range 0-4).
EnablePostProcess
You can enable or disable it. Disable it to get FPS boost.
If you come across any other user-friendly tweaks to boost graphics and performance of Tomb Raider on PC, let us know by commenting below!
