Next-Gen Face-Off: Tomb Raider Definitive Edition

[Administrator]

Earlier this week we kicked off our Tomb Raider coverage with a look at performance on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, uncovering some interesting revelations behind the hotly discussed frame-rate situation - but this is just the beginning of the story. There's so much more to cover: Square Enix promises a dramatic graphical upgrade over the previous console releases with this new Definitive Edition, factoring in brand new effects, a remodelled Lara Croft, lashings of extra detail, and physics-based enhancements that supposedly puts this next-gen version of the game ahead of the spectacular PC release. But just how much of an improvement is it, and are the differences worth splashing out for?
To begin with, let's address the differences between the two versions of the Definitive Edition on offer. PlayStation 4 users get a comfortably delivered 1080p presentation backed up with a post-process FXAA solution that has minimal impact on texture quality, sporting decent coverage across the scene, bar some shimmer around more finely detailed objects. Meanwhile the situation is more interesting on the Xbox One: the anti-aliasing solution remains unchanged, but we see the inclusion of what looks like a variable resolution framebuffer in some scenes, while some cut-scenes are rendered at a locked 900p, explaining the additional blur in some of our Xbox One screenshots. Curiously, the drop in resolution doesn't seem to occur during gameplay - it's only reserved for select cinematics - suggesting that keeping performance consistent during these sequences was a priority for Xbox One developer United Front Games.
For the most part the main graphical bells and whistles are lavished equally across both consoles, although intriguingly there are a few areas that do see Xbox One cutbacks. As demonstrated in our head-to-head video below (and in our vast Tomb Raider comparison gallery), alpha-based effects in certain areas give the appearance of rendering at half resolution - though other examples do look much cleaner. We also see a lower-quality depth of field in cut-scenes, and reduced levels of anisotropic filtering on artwork during gameplay. Curiously, there are also a few lower-resolution textures in places on Xbox One, but this seems to be down to a bug (perhaps on level of detail transitions) as opposed to a conscious downgrade.
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