New Tomb Raider Legend demo

Graphics card maker NVIDIA is hosting an updated 1.2 version of the Tomb Raider: Legend PC demo offering you the chance to enable the game's "Next Gen" graphics option, which was absent from a previous PC demo.

As before, the demo showcases the game's first level, set in Bolivia, which sees Lara work her way through mountainous environments before tackling the inside of an ancient tomb full of jumping puzzles and booby-traps and animals to shoot (yay).

The new graphics option provides a massive improvement too, adding depth to flat surfaces with parallax mapping, upping textural detail noticeably and enabling all sorts of shadowing techniques that subtly improve the overall image.

NVIDIA recommends you play the demo, which weighs in at 503MB (including DirectX 9), using a GeForce 7800 or better graphics card with version 84.43 or newer drivers - but then they would say that. Competing cards of a similar stature ought to produce impressive results too.

Naturally you don't have to use the high-end graphics option if you don't have kit up to the task, and the game still looks pretty handsome without it - although you wouldn't save much disk space by opting for the old file (if you can still find it) since that itself was around 475MB.

As you probably know, Tomb Raider: Legend is out now on PC, Xbox 360, PS2, Xbox and even PSP, with Cube, DS and GBA versions on the way later this year. This isn't the only demo either - those of you with Xbox 360 Live access can log onto Marketplace and download a similar demo to play through Bolivia that way.

Check out our reviews of the Xbox 360 and PSP versions for more info on Lara's return.