Tomb Raider's image quality and detail are outstanding. The Crystal Dynamics engine successfully used DX11 features like tessellation, ambient occlusion, and depth of field to display more lush and rich environments. Tessellation smoothed out characters, and also gave more depth to objects we encountered and the environment around us. We are glad to see the inclusion of tessellation again in games. It seems most game's released aren't using tessellation. It was the talk of the town when DX11 was released, and some games made it a showpiece, but lately, it's a technology that was kind of shoved under the rug for a lot of new games in 2012. We are finally seeing some new games that use this technology and we are thrilled to see it used on characters and environment. The PC platform has the GPU performance to use it, and use it we want.

The shadows were another part of this game that provided more depth and detail. Not only were there high resolution shadows, but we had SSAO working as well and real-time globally illuminated images. The most disappointing thing in Tomb Raider is the performance cost required to enable SSAA at higher resolutions. The image quality greatly improves when using 2X SSAA and 4X SSAA which really disappoints us how much single GPUs struggled with it.

TressFX was the graphics option that made the image quality stand out compared to other video games. For the first time we witnessed what it was like to have real-time individuality rendered hair that reacts to your movements, jumping, or being hit. It also reacts to weather effects like wind and rain. When running hair quality at normal, Lara's ponytail was one piece of hair stuck together. Enabling TressFX allows her hair to have thousands of individually rendered strands, each of which react to her movements and the other variables. There are some bugs that need to be fixed with TressFX however, but this looks like a very good start to seeing this technology in games we can buy. Strands of hair have been shown off for many years in demos but never delivered in games truly.

There are some problems with the hair clipping through Lara and her clothes, or her weapons, not rendering at times, and some shadows cast on her face are overbearing. The physics of the technology needs to be improved, there were many times the hair would blow a little too extreme, or the strands would be a little too lively. The strands would bounce a little too much, and the clipping through things took away from the immersion. Performance while using TressFX was faster after receiving performance drivers from AMD and NVIDIA. NVIDIA also cured the problem that existed, blurring Lara's hair when 2X SSAA was enabled at higher resolutions, and with 4X SSAA at 1080p.

This is just the first rendition of this technology, and hopefully it will be improved over time. The looks are good, but the physical properties really need to be improved. It is an excellent first attempt though, and we are finally seeing what we've seen in tech-demo's for so long, good looking hair in games. It sure took them long enough to get this kind of technology in games!