Batman Arkham Asylum
A big hit this fall, we can’t ignore Batman Arkham Asylum in spite of the partisan nature of the technology it uses. Of course, we’re talking about GPU PhysX, a proprietary accelleration technology only supported by the GeForces.
We installed patch 1.1 and used the built-in benchmark with all options pushed to a max, except, at first, PhysX effects.
NVIDIA has taken advantage of helping developers put antialiasing in place in the game and has restricted functionality to GeForces. As we first thought, the implementation is standard and therefore also compatible with Radeons but it has been protected by NVIDIA. A detestable practice to force Radeon users, and testers, to activate antialiasing via the control panel, which is much less efficient than doing it directly in the game as the pilot applies antialiasing blindly and unnecessarily on all surfaces. Thankfully, all you have to do is dress your Radeon up as a GeForce with ATI Tray Tools for the game control panel to accept activating antialiasing. This is what we did and we noted a significant gain on our previous results.
We also tested the game with high PhysX effects activated:
As the Radeons can't accelerate these effects, they're limited by the CPU, on which moreover, not all the cores are used.
