Test System And Settings
Batman: Arkham Asylum is based on the venerable Unreal 3 Engine, so it doesn't require the most powerful hardware to produce high frame rates. Because of this, we chose the highest visual fidelity options when testing, leaving out only anti-aliasing (AA) and PhysX from our basic settings. We used the in-game benchmark to keep results consistent.
We tested a solid sample of cards from our "Best Graphics Cards for the Money" column. At the time of testing, we didn't have any new ATI Radeon HD 5000-series cards available in our Canada office, but keep in mind that the new 5770 should perform closely to the Radeon HD 4870, and the 5750 will probably perform in the neighborhood of the Radeon HD 4850 and GeForce GTS 250.
| Intel Test System (Performance & CPU Benchmarks) | AMD Test System (Some CPU Benchmarks) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i7-920 (Bloomfield), | AMD Phenom II X4 965 (Deneb), | ||
| Motherboard | ASRock X58 Supercomputer | Asus M4A785TD-V EVO | ||
| Networking | Onboard Gigabit LAN controller | |||
| Memory | Mushkin PC3-10700 | Mushkin PC3-10700 | ||
| Graphics | Asus ENGTX260 796MB DDR3 PCIe | |||
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Caviar WD50 00AAJS-00YFA, | Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB | ||
| Power | Thermaltake Toughpower 1200W | ePower EP-1200P10-T2 | ||
| Software and Drivers | ||||
| Operating System | Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit 6.0.6001, SP1 | Microsoft Windows 7 x64 | ||
| DirectX version | DirectX 10 | DirectX 11 | ||
| Graphics Drivers | Nvidia ForceWare 191.07, ATI Catalyst 9.9 | |||
Great article, really informative. Looking forward to hearing back from the devs regarding CPU usage.
cant wait to try it.
This is a Games for Windows Live product. Or On-line account Evil DRM malware tracking software required.
I really want to play this; but alas I cannot buy it
Wow..I didn't expect GT 220 is a good dedicated Physx card,.. Off searching in eBay LoL
Looks to me like nVidia had this game rigged to better benefit it's cards, note the decrease in CPU involvement as the physX options are cranked up.
That is why Arkham Asylum should be Game of the Year - It is a work of art!
Would a setip with an Nvidia card for PhysX and an ATI card for graphics work? Noob question i know :-P
Would a setip with an Nvidia card for PhysX and an ATI card for graphics work? Noob question i know :-P
I don't think it's a daft question - there was a= bit of news or an article a short while back saying that nvidia had set something so that physX couldn't be used if there was a non-nvidia card handling the graphics (or something like that). I was going to raise the same question as to 'can the GT220 be used as a physx card regardless of the main GPU?' as I can't remember much about the other article.
I play this game using 2 8800GTs, one for graphics and one for the physx (on high).
All settings on max and res at 1080p
Benchmark gets about 40fps, played the whole game though with no noticable slowdown.
The physics were locked down because PhysX is an nVidia product (no one supported AGEIA dedicated cards when the original company (Ageia) was making the entry to the market),as some profit based companies would still use havok at that times and not see the huge potential of the PhysX of AGEIA, it's only reasonable that now that Ageia merged with nVidia, they want to make profit by selling their graphic cards.
The second reason, I think, is that the PhysX wouldn't even try to use the CPU for Physics for performance related issues (smooth frame rate in every case scenario rig).
As I recon, AMD is making a move in the Physics with the 5th serie.
Just wait and see... Again