Date:
Monday , October 19, 2009
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
Google +1

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!

continued...

Apples to Apples Performance

Overall, Batman: Arkham Asylum performed admirably on all nine of the video cards we tested today. That fact is hardly surprising, considering the game was built upon Unreal Engine 3 technology, an engine that has proven to be a good performer for many games in the past. Nonetheless, our Highest Playable Settings section does not always tell the whole story. Sometimes, we want to make direct comparisons that may be excluded from the Highest Playable pages based on the pricing stratification of the video cards in question. So, in this section, we are going to look at some performance comparisons that we found interesting.

AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870 vs. Radeon HD 5850

Article Image

(Click the above image for a larger version.)

Comparing the two new Radeon HD 5800 series video cards, we find that the Radeon HD 5870 is about 16% faster than the less expensive Radeon HD 5850 in Batman: Arkham Asylum. The street price difference on these two video cards is about $120 USD, so that translates to roughly $7.50 per one percent performance increase. This falls in line with AMD’s claim that we would see around a 20% difference in performance between these two video cards.

AMD ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs. Radeon HD 4890

Article Image

(Click the above image for a larger version.)

AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 enjoyed a 14% performance advantage over the single-GPU Radeon HD 4890. So there is at least SOME performance scaling on AMD multi-GPU solutions here, but it is weak, to say the least.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 vs. GeForce GTX 275

Article Image

(Click the above image for a larger version.)

Here, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 outperformed the GeForce GTX 295 by about 10%. Clearly, multi-GPU scaling isn’t working at all here and may even be hurting, at least for the GTX 295.