Settings

Rise of the Tomb Raider has plenty of settings, most of which you've already seen in other games. I'm happy to report that there are no artificial FPS limits in the game. Each individual option has several settings, so even slower computers should run the game well, although at lower fidelity.

MSAA is not available as an anti-aliasing option, probably because the game uses a deferred rendering engine. Instead, you can select SSAA, which is super sampling that effectively renders the game at 2x or 4x the resolution to then downscale that image, which comes at a huge performance hit that's usually not worth it. The feature is basically the same as Dynamic Super Resolution (NVIDIA) or Virtual Super Resolution (AMD).

What I find interesting is that HBAO+ automatically gets enabled with the "Very High" preset despite being an NVIDIA technology. It seems to work on AMD cards though. Also noteworthy is the lack of an "Ultra" option since the "Very High" option does not set every option to its highest setting.

Pure Hair is an evolution of AMD's TressFX hair-rendering technology, which we saw in the previous title. It works well on both NVIDIA and AMD cards, but does come with a performance hit.

Settings Comparison