Batman: Arkham Asylum

Batman: Arkham Asylum is another brand-new PC game, and has been burning up the review charts. It’s an Unreal Engine 3 based game, something that’s not immediately obvious from just looking at it, which is rare for UE3 based games.

NVIDIA has put a lot of marketing muscle into the game as part of their The Way It’s Meant to Be Played program, and as a result it ships with PhysX support and 3D Vision support. Unfortunately NVIDIA’s influence has extended to its anti-aliasing abilities too, as its in-game selective AA abilities only work on NVIDIA’s cards. AMD’s cards can perform AA on the game, but only via traditional full screen anti-aliasing, which isn’t nearly as efficient. Because of this, this is the only game where we will not be using AA, as doing so produces meaningless results given the different AA modes used.

Since we can’t use AA, the name of the game is still “runaway performance”, with the 5850 bringing in 88fps. Meanwhile this is as close a gap between the 5850 and the GTX 285 as we’re going to see, with the 5850 beating the GTX 285 by only a few percent.  The 5850 Crossfire maintains a similar gap, but doesn’t fall behind as it has in some tests.

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  • MadMan007 - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link

    Should have done HAWX in DX 10.1 mode then the HD5850 > GTX 285 sweep would have been complete. Or to flip it around, enable PhysX (lol) on some games.
  • MadMan007 - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link

    I have to point this out because it's something I've now seen on two websites and it irks me a little bit just like 'solid state capacitors' does. In the last sentence on page one the plural of die in this case is dies not dice. Someone didn't edit this carefully!
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link

    If you search our archives, Anand has discussed this in depth. It's dice.
  • papapapapapapapababy - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link

    btw, this card is powerless against "the way is meant to be played"
    nvidia keeps bribing developers left and right, ATI does nothing
    (except boring sideshow penis wars), meanwhile the poor ATI users cant seem to play NFS SHIFT 640 x 480, all set to low, ( my -rebranded- 9800 does it great btw) + there is no in-game selective AA available to any ATI Radeon user in Batman, (another TWIMTBP game) + it looks like empty crap with all the shit nvidia - removed ( yes, really no smoke? no papers? no flags? not even static flags? what about GRAW? it used to work fine on reg cpus...)
  • papapapapapapapababy - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link


    my "prototype" RV740 @ AC-S1 is better...

    Core Clock: 875

    Idle temp: 29C

    Noise: 0db

    TDP: 80W(+)


    + it doesn't look like the 60's Batmobile
















  • AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link

    What, like this one?
    http://student.dcu.ie/~lawlesc4/Batmobile%20%28TV%...">http://student.dcu.ie/~lawlesc4/Batmobile%20%28TV%...
  • ipay - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link

    Except it doesn't hav DX11, so it's not better. Go troll somewhere else.
  • strikeback03 - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link

    I suppose we probably have to wait for the consumer driver release to know for sure, but how is the stability of these? The only two AMD cards I have direct experience with have both had driver issues, so that is the one factor that would keep me from considering one of the lower-powered versions of this architecture once they are released.
  • Jamahl - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link

    It is you who had the issue not the drivers. That is why millions of others have ati's without driver issues.
  • strikeback03 - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link

    Yeah, I definitely think closing my laptop lid and expecting it to have the same resolution set when I reopen is my fault *rolls eyes*.

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