Tomb Raider (2013): what TressFX and HDAO really cost
Two AMD-sponsored features in the menu are why Tomb Raider underperforms on non-AMD hardware. Turn them off and gain 30–40%.
Tomb Raider's 2013 reboot still looks good, which makes it frustrating when it runs at half the frame rate you expect. The cause is not age or optimisation — it is two AMD-sponsored technologies sitting in the graphics menu, both of which are dramatically more expensive on NVIDIA hardware than they are on the cards they were built for.
TressFX hair
TressFX is a hair simulation technology that was revolutionary at launch and brought even flagship cards to their knees. Its impact on frame rate is major, and especially so on non-AMD GPUs. Setting hair to Normal disables it and is the single largest FPS gain in the game — worth roughly 30–40% on mid-range hardware.
"Ultra" ambient occlusion is not what it sounds like
In this game the Ultra ambient occlusion setting stands for HDAO, AMD's ambient occlusion technology. On NVIDIA cards it can cause major performance loss. Set ambient occlusion to Normal (SSAO) instead. The visual difference is small; the cost difference is not.
Compare render scaling instead →Real internal pixel count at any scale percentage before you change a setting.What is genuinely free
- Texture quality: with 2GB of VRAM or more, Ultra textures cost very little frame rate. Spend your budget here.
- Anisotropic filtering at 16x: essentially free on modern hardware, and it keeps ground detail sharp into the distance.
- FXAA over SSAA: FXAA costs almost nothing. 2x and 4x SSAA are supersampling — they render the game at a higher internal resolution and are brutally expensive.
One modern-Windows trap
On newer Windows systems with display scaling set above 100%, Exclusive Fullscreen may not apply correctly at startup, causing significant FPS loss. Disable DPI optimisations for the executable in its Compatibility settings, or revert system scaling to default.
See how your GPU ranks →Relative GPU performance with cited 2026 figures.Disable TressFX, drop ambient occlusion to Normal, keep textures and filtering high — and Tomb Raider runs like the well-optimised game it actually is.
If you have a quad-core or better CPU
There is a registry tweak that raises frame rate in CPU-heavy areas like the Shantytown hub through better core utilisation: add a DWORD named MultiCoreFlushMode with value 1 under HKCUSoftwareCrystal DynamicsTomb RaiderGraphics. The Linux build of the game applies it automatically, which is a fair indication that it works. Change one setting at a time and re-test in the same spot, because Tomb Raider's menu does not tell you which option actually cost you the frames.