I've been looking forward to playing Tomb Raider on PC for the last week, ever since Evan's review made me think, "Okay, yep, sounds like this is indeed my kinda game."
I booted it up, played through the opening bit that I'd played at press events, and upon making my way past the dangling LOST-airplane… the game crashed to desktop. Uh-oh. I fired it up again, and it crashed again. I made it to the first campsite… and crash.
It seems that the problem is with GeForce graphics cards—I'm using a 660Ti, and plenty of other users have reported similar problems. NVidia says they're working on a fix, but in the meantime, I (and plenty of others) have found an easy way to make the game stop crashing: Turn off tessellation.
After toggling the tessellation switch to "off," my game hasn't crashed a single time. This being PC gaming, there will probably be a few other issues, but tessellation seems to solve the most common one. While it seems likely that either Crystal Dynamics will patch the game or NVidia will release a new driver for their graphics cards, in the meantime, to get the game to run without crashing, say goodbye to your lovely tessellated polygons, at least for a little while. Don't worry, the game still looks good.
I'll have more thoughts on Tomb Raider's PC port pretty soon.