If you’re not sure how Vignette Blur differs from Motion Blur and which of them is responsible for your framerate, Nixxes (who I believe are largely responsible for this port) have you covered. Other than manual settings for the usual annoyances like Depth of Field, Motion Blur, Bloom, Ambient Occlusion and the like, you’ve also got a big text box on the right for every single option which details what it does and how much of a performance hit it’s likely to cause. I’ve got no idea how high the resolution goes (I don’t know if it’s capped at 1920×1080, or if it’s just showing that as my cap because my monitor doesn’t support higher), but every other option is extremely welcome. This is normally the sort of thing that’s reserved for slightly lazy ports, or for games that were never really designed for the PC – but as it turns out, all these options are in the game anyway. After that, though… well, I did worry, because Rise of the Tomb Raider kicks off with a bunch of options in a loader. It’s got a fairly svelte install, clocking in at around 18GB. If you were worried that the relatively short time between the “exclusive” Xbox release and the PC release meant that no time was being spent on making this work for the PC, your fears were in vain. The good news is that, based on my experience, Rise of the Tomb Raider has a pretty damn good PC version – as in, it actually deserves the title of “PC version” rather than “PC port”. In short, I should be able to run it okay.

The listed minimum specs are an i3-2100, 6GB RAM, and a 2GB GeForce GTX 650 or a 2GB AMD HD7770.

Obligatory system specs: i7-3820, 16GB RAM, 4GB GeForce GTX 970. That’s not to say that the quality of the PC version has no impact on how I feel about the game, but this way, I’ve got a lot more freedom to really explore those aspects without dominating the review. Rather than shoehorning six paragraphs of text about the specifics of the PC version into the Rise of the Tomb Raider review (which should be up shortly), I figured I’d do it as an entirely separate article, where I can go a bit more in-depth.

I’m doing something a bit different here.

Rise of the tomb raider pc version