Tomb Raider (2013) — Tips & Tricks

FXAA costs almost nothing and looks fine. 2x and 4x SSAA render the game at a higher internal resolution — it looks excellent and is brutally expensive.

With 2 GB of VRAM or more, Texture Quality Ultra and 16x anisotropic filtering cost very little and noticeably sharpen surfaces. These are the settings to spend your budget on.

Add a DWORD named MultiCoreFlushMode with value 1 under HKCU\Software\Crystal Dynamics\Tomb Raider\Graphics. It improves frame rate in CPU-heavy hubs like Shantytown through better core utilisation. The Linux version applies it automatically.

Set RenderAPI to 9 under the same registry key to force DX9. Tessellation and TressFX are disabled as a result, and in some cases performance drops rather than rises — benchmark both before committing.

Windows 32-bit executables may need the large address aware flag to work properly on modern machines with more memory.

Before any reinstall, driver sweep or mod change, copy the save folder for Tomb Raider (2013). Cloud saves are convenient but they can also sync a corrupted file back onto your machine — knowing where the local copy lives is what actually protects you.

Launch options, config file edits and INI tweaks are easy to forget. A short note means you can undo a change six months later instead of reverse-engineering your own setup.

Pick a demanding area in Tomb Raider (2013), load the same save and play for the same duration after each change. Judging performance by feel is how people conclude a real improvement did nothing.

Right-click the Tomb Raider (2013) executable, open the Compatibility tab, tick Disable fullscreen optimizations, then open Change high DPI settings and set the scaling override to Application. This resolves black screens, low-resolution output and alt-tab freezes across a large number of Unreal Engine 3 and older DirectX 11 titles.

All three sit in Settings > Gaming. They cost RAM and GPU resources and interfere with fullscreen rendering. Some newer titles do benefit from Game Mode, so test rather than assuming — but start with it off.

Balanced and silent profiles let the CPU and GPU downclock under load. Select High or Ultimate Performance, and monitor temperatures — crashes that appear ten minutes in rather than at launch are very often thermal rather than software.

Several engines rely on virtual memory even with ample RAM, and disabling the page file is a recurring cause of "out of memory" errors on machines with 32 GB installed. Leave Windows in control of it.