Introduction

Tomb Raider- Angel of Darkness has been a popular benchmark lately because of its heavy utilizations of shaders. It also helps that it is a large franchise and graphically, it looks very good on the PC. Tomb Raider also manages to stress pretty much all the DirectX 9 cards we have especially with all the options turned on. There has been some controversy over the benchmarking feature in Tomb Raider and it was pulled from a subsequent patch apparently due to some agreement between Eidos and nVidia. In any case, TRAOD stresses even high end cards so we will explore how to make the game run faster.

A couple sites that were referenced for this guide are the forums over at Empire Gaming as well as Beyond3D's very thorough Tomb Raider Benchmarking Guide. The scope of this article will not nearly be as thorough as the Beyond3D one but more of a quick and dirty guide and explanations of how we setup the benchmark and got the game to run faster in our lab.