Published in Graphics

Battle over Batman: Arkham Asylum AA

by on07 October 2009

Imagevs.Image

Who did what?

During recent days, you could see a fierce battle between AMD and Nvidia PR teams over Batman: Arkham Asylum and the fact that PhysX and AA works only when you run it on Nvidia GPUs, while on AMD cards the game worked, but without the in-game AA.

Nvidia's team worked with developers and designed the AA engine by themselves. That's a clear fact, and thus the game does indeed look better when paired up with an Nvidia GPU. On the other hand, AMD's PR team is adamant that Nvidia had a lot to do with the fact that the game simply doesn't like AMD GPUs. According to a statement made by AMD's Ian McNaughton, AMD did provide the developer with a solution, but it didn't make its way into the final release of the game.

According to the guys over at PCPer and their sources at Eidos, AMD was offered to send engineers to the studio and do the same work that Nvidia did, but AMD declined. The fact that Nvidia's TWIMTBP team did a better job than AMD's developer relations team is obvious, and it has been like that for a long time. On the other hand AMD's hands aren't exactly clean in this story as some titles that were previously released and will be released in the future, will work better on AMD hardware, especially due to the close relationship between AMD and the developers of those titles.

The bottom line is that this isn't something new and the same situation happened on multiple occasions. The Half-Life 2 was ATI game, Assassins Creed was Nvidia's, HAWX worked better on ATI GPUs, Battleforge was faster on ATI. DIRT 2 will possibly be faster on ATI, and bunch of other titles work faster, or look better on one or the other GPU.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is just a drop in the sea of such titles, but it looks like that the fact that Batman is a decent selling PC game changed the way how things are, and suddenly it became a problem. We've tried the Batman game on an HD 4850 and the game worked flawlessly and looked pretty good even without in-game AA. We will certainly try it on Nvidia hardware as well and we are quite sure that it will look better.

We must give credit to Nvidia for sending a team of people that has designed the AA engine in order to make the game better. The game works on ATI hardware as well, and AMD can still design the AA engine and convince Eidos to make a patch for those users that have ATI hardware.

We are quite sure that ATI will turn its attention to DX 11 titles like Stalker and Dirt 2, which will probably work faster on ATI GPUs, while Nvidia will turn its attention to Assassins Creed 2 which will come next year and the situation will again be the same.

Last modified on 07 October 2009
Rate this item
(0 votes)