Date:
Monday , October 19, 2009
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Batman: Arkham Asylum & PhysX Gameplay Review

In Batman: Arkham Asylum, the Dark Knight pummels an endless stream of thugs, but will the game deliver the same two-fisted brutality to your video card? Find out as we examine gameplay performance and image quality on nine of today's video cards. Extensive testing of NVIDIA's PhysX and what it means to your gameplay experience!

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Gameplay Summary

2560x1600

At 2560x1600, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 is the clear performance winner. It was the only video card in this evaluation that was capable of running graphics and PhysX at the same time at 2560x1600. Not only did it allow us to use Medium physics settings, but it also allowed us to enable 4X MSAA and 16X AF. The GTX 295 actually performed remarkably worse than the GTX 285, and even slightly slower than the GTX 275. In our testing at least, SLI appeared to offer no performance improvement in Batman: Arkham Asylum.

The AMD ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 performed well enough, and very slightly edged out the Radeon HD 4890, so CrossFire at least appears to be offering some performance advantage, though the extent of the improvement is dubious at best. In the value segment, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 250 outperformed the Radeon HD 4770 by leaps and bounds in this game. The HD 4770 was the only video card in this evaluation that forced us to lower settings from the maximum available in-game options, forcing us to disable distortion and ambient occlusion at 2560x1600.

1920x1200

At 1920x1200, the Radeon HD 5850 and HD 4890 video cards were able to play with 8X MSAA, while the GeForce GTX 275 was able to play with 8X CSAA but also with Medium PhysX settings enabled. In the low end, the GeForce GTS 250 was also able to play with 8X CSAA at 1920x1200, but it could not handle any PhysX calculations. The Radeon HD 4770 was able to play with maximum in-game settings (excluding PhysX), but was not strong enough to handle any AA at 1920x1200.

1680x1050

Playing Batman: Arkham Asylum at 1680x1050, the NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 allowed us to enable 8X MSAA, while AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4770 could cope with only 2X MSAA.

CPU and Memory Utilization

As far as CPU utilization is concerned, we found it to be remarkably even across all of our testing. Even when we were running PhysX on the CPU, utilization was only 4% higher on average than when we offloaded it to the GPU. Let me say that again so that it will sink in a bit further: loading the CPU with PhysX calculations (PhysX is being calculated on the GPU but obviously brings with it some overhead.) only burdened our quad-core CPU by 4% more than without that processing load.

Memory-wise, it was all over the map. With PhysX disabled, memory usage from video card to video card did not deviate in a considerable fashion. But with PhysX enabled and running on the same GPU as the graphics, memory utilization almost doubled. When we took it off the graphics GPU and put it on its own dedicated GPU, it went back down, but was still a good amount higher than when running PhysX on the CPU, and when PhysX was disabled completely. One possible reason for this is that, when running graphics and PhysX on a single GPU, the video card may have been swapping data out to system memory. At any rate, it seems that you can expect your games to use more memory if you enable PhysX acceleration on either a shared or a dedicated GPU.