Legends technology

As you can expect from the re-use of the Legend game engine, TRA does look fine. While there is a bit less shader eye candy this time as target platforms are the PC, PS2 and PSP, the textures are still good and the main things are present and well-executed. Lara responds smoothly, characters are detailed and the level design is polished. One thing that is missing is the 'Next Generation' mode, so the lighting and shading is simpler than in TR: Legend. This is probably related to the fact that there is no Xbox 360 or PS3 versions announced.

The listed minimum requirements are very low - and this being YouGamers, we had to try it out to believe it. After raiding an undisclosed museum for an old SM1.1 graphics card, we actually tested out the game on the listed minimum specification - an AMD AthlonXP 1500+ and a NVIDIA GeForce 3. While 256MB of system memory isn't enough for anything (XP itself is almost unusable with such a small amount of RAM), I must admit that the game does run on the minimum specification with 512MB RAM, generally reaching 20-30fps in most areas. You get some slowdowns in wide open spaces, and turning on shader effects kills the frame rate dead (sub 10fps), but it runs. The YouGamers minimum is set higher, as a game like Tomb Raider: Anniversary really needs to run at a solid 30fps+ to be playable, but it must be said that almost any system not actually raided from some tomb can play the game if you disable shadows, depth of field, motion blur and the rest of the shiny.

TRA on a GeForce 3 with shadows and shader effects disabled.	Closeup with same settings on GeForce 3.
Same gate on GeForce 3 with shader effects on. Even this ancient card can do some pretties.	Still GeForce 3 with everything on. Sadly this is unplayably slow.
Same spot with a Radeon X1900 and everything turned on - SM2.0 shaders are slightly different.	Lara's "attributes" in full closeup glory on Radeon X1900.

The shader effects do look a teeny bit nicer on a modern card, and on a fast system your frame rate generally can't go under a solid 60fps. The only place where we experienced some hitching below this figure was in certain specific places in the Atlantis levels where there is unusually high amount of detail in the view. In any case, the YouGamers minimum system will run the game at nearly 60fps without shader effects, and our recommended system can safely turn all the shiny bits on without any problems.

Egypt sure didn't look this good ten years ago...

Complex organic shapes and architectural detail can cause some noticeable framerate dips, but the issue is very rare.

TRA offers a wide range of resolutions and supports widescreen modes perfectly. Beyond that, graphics options are fairly limited. All you can really do is turn off shadows and the shader effects such as motion blur and depth of field.