Turn off tesselation. Fixed the issue completely for me. Was crashing once every few minutes after the cave section now it hasn't happened once.

Also, if you want to use the cool tressfx hair stuff but don't like the performance hit, turn off High Precision to compensate. Big performance gains for a tiny downgrade to shadows/lighting but I think the hair effects more than make up for it.

What ever as much as it pisses me off I am just going to wait for new drivers I want to play this game at it's maximum.

Yeah, worked for me. Did you also get weird tearing at the same places (either near the top or the bottom of the screen) with tesselation on? it went away as soon as I turned it off. Weird.

So what exactly does high precision do? It didn't seem like it was hitting my fps too hard..

Also, any chance of a new driver better optimized for tressFX?

It crashes for me at the campfire where you unlock fast travel. Tried turning off tessellation and no joy. Also tried turning off the exclusive fullscreen, v-sync, tried older and beta drivers and several other 'fixes' and still no luck.

Nvidia have said they are aware of the issue and are working on it. Apparently they only got the code of the final build this weekend and it created a lot of instability.

I'm just gonna wait for the driver update or a patch and just start again, only about 90 mins into the game.

Quote of post for those that are interested and link

"We are aware of major performance and stability issues with GeForce GPUs running Tomb Raider with maximum settings. Unfortunately, NVIDIA didn’t receive final code until this past weekend which substantially decreased stability, image quality and performance over a build we were previously provided. We are working closely with Crystal Dynamics to address and resolve all game issues as quickly as possible.

In the meantime, we would like to apologize to GeForce users that are not able to have a great experience playing Tomb Raider, as they have come to expect with all of their favorite PC games."

Oh but it gets better!

"Hi Brent, this isn't solely a driver issue. The developer needs to make some changes on their end to fix their issues on GeForce GPUs. This will require code changes to the game."

I have loads of tearing in cutscenes but none in actual gameplay which is weird.

Roll back to Nvidia driver 310.90 if you want to use tesselation without crashes. Worked for me (GTX 670).

Turned off Tesselation and Exclusive Fullscreen (have no idea what that even is) and it worked for me.

But Nvidia's really good about fixing these issues and having timely driver updates, so I have no doubt there will be a patch soon.

Wow, weird. I have a Nvidia card and haven't had any issues so far. Hope it gets worked out soon, it's a pretty fun game.

I just turned off tressfx, tesselation and exclusive fullscreen to fix all the problems I was having (plus I lowered AF to 8x and shadow resolution to medium). The game looks a lot worse, but the framerates are super solid and I'm not getting any graphical glitches or crashing to desktop every 15mins.

Ive found that Level Of Detail at Normal helps when enabling other stuff.
Also does anyone know any bits for MSAA, or does that even work well with this game?

@zenmastah: MSAA definitely destroys my framerate, but I think that's as much a part of the 660 ti's small memory bus as anything else.

@vitor: Yep, that first cutscene was hard to look at and a really disappointing way to start an otherwise great looking game. Stayed at 30fps too, whereas I mostly hover a lttle under 60 in game.

Lower AF will net you almost zero results, that functionality has been virtually free from a performance perspective for 10 years.

Are the problems limited to 600-series cards? I've had no problems so far with my 580s, current beta drivers.

I got pretty good performance just by turning off tesselation, but of course I have another problem. There's a weird flicker around bushes, it looks like the shadows are acting up but it happens even with everything set to low.

Anyone having that issue ?

Yeah, theres something going on with the shadows, its Skyrim all over again..

I tried the beta drivers because why not... It actually fixed the flickering.

Old ass i5 655k (dual core) and overclocked GTX470 here, and no crashes. Only issue I've had is a strange "jumping "in the image when I'm in large areas such as the first area with the hand crank door. Tried disabling things one at a time, and it turned out to be Post FX. I'm guessing it's a motion blur bug on Nvidia, and disabling it got rid of the weird glitch.

Outside of that, I'm very surprised at how good this looks and runs on my aged hardware. 60fps in the caves and intro sequence, and still above 30 in the huge climbing areas. It chugs a bit in those big open spaces, but still better than a 360 or PS3 would do.

Forgot to mention settings for folks like me not running a supercomputer.

1920x1080, triple buffered, FXAA, 60hz. High graphical preset, then manually upped textures to ultra, tesselation on and PostFX & TressFX off. Game looks really good, even on a several year old machine.