Setting up Tomb Raider and Recording a Demo

Unfortunately Tomb Raider is not the easiest benchmark to setup. You have to acquire the v49 patch which has been pulled by Eidos. A quick Google should point to several locations that still have the patch mirrored. There are no pre-recorded demos so a level has to be selected, and a demo has to be recorded.

The level that we selected was prague3a as suggested by Beyond3D. The beginning of our particular demo runs very fast. When the room starts fogging up, the performance drop is very noticeable. The next portion consists of an explosion and the performance drops noticeably also. The final portion of the demo takes place in a large room with a lot of water. The water effects are PS2.0 intensive and it is easily the slowest part of the demo.

Although benchmark numbers later on show framerates in the 40s, it is definitely not the case in this part of the demo. There are a lot of other levels to play around with. I believe that all maps start with LocationNx where Location is either paris or prague, N is a number and x is a letter. I have gone through a few levels but I have not extensively checked out the valid range of letters or numbers so give that a shot.

Here is our startup sequence for recording a benchmark -

The shortcut is -

"x:\installdirectory\bin\TRAOD_P3.exe" -level="data\maps\prague3a" -debugkeys -padrecord="bin\prague3a.pad" -godmode

The Start In is-

x:\installdirectory

Replace x with your drive letter , and installdirectory with your install directory so it looks something like "c:\tomb raider angel of darkness" or whatever pathname you have decided to use.

-level="data\maps\prague3a"

Prague3a can be replaced with paris1a, paris1b etc etc. Play around with the numbers and letters and see what works. Prague and paris are the only two possible levels as far as I know.

-debugkeys

Apparently this allows you to fly and do some funky things but I could not get it working

-padrecord="bin\prague3a.pad

Replace the prague3a.pad name to something more to your liking for the demo name

-godmode

This does not make you invincible. It gives you weapons and also increases your grip strength so that you can hang off ledges for a longer period. This is important to use because if it is not on, there are levels you cannot complete because your base strength will not be enough to get you through.

Setting up a shortcut with those command line parameters will start a demo recording function. Run around and look at the pretty scenery until you get bored and hit Alt-F4 to quit the game.

This is what your shortcut properties page should look like