Galaxy’s GTX 480 SuperOverclock – The World’s fastest single GPU video card!

Batman: Arkham AsylumBatman: Arkham Asylum is an action-adventure/stealth video game based on DC Comics’ Batman.  Arkham Asylum as written by veteran Batman writer Paul Dini is based directly on the long-running comic book’s Dark Knight character. The Joker devised an elaborate plot from inside Arkham Asylum that Batman is personally forced to put a stop to. The game’s primary characters are superbly voiced by the actors Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill and Arleen Sorkin who reprise their roles as Batman, the Joker and Harley Quinn.

The game is played as an over-the-shoulder, third-person perspective action-adventure game with a primary focus on Batman’s combat abilities, stealth, detective skills and complete with an arsenal of gadgets that can be used in both combat and as exploring in “detective mode”.The game uses a “Freeflow” combat system as well as the ability to use Batarangs and the Bat-Claw. The player also has access to progressively stronger counter attacks as well as a special attack that can quickly take down a single foe. Stealth tactics includes silent takedowns by sneaking up on foes including dropping and/or gliding from overhead perches.

Batman: Arkham Asylum uses a highly modified version of the Unreal Engine 3. It does not support AA natively but must be added in and supported by the game’s developer.  Unfortunately we cannot compare Batman: Arkham Asylum using our GeForce exactly against the Radeon with PhysX on.  In the game’s control panel, the settings are also different, depending if you play with a GeForce or a Radeon. Using a Radeon, you will get a warning if you try to set Hardware Accelerated Physics to anything other than ‘off’. Ignoring the warning and setting our HD 5870 to the in-between “normal” physics setting, the frame rates are cut by almost 90% at 1680×1050 resolution – literally down from an average of 200 frames per second to about twenty!!

This time we did something different from our usual testing – we set MSAA in each vendor’s control panel and did not set it in-game for Nvidia cards.  The developer optimized MSAA for GeForce cards in game but you must set non-optimized AA in the Catalyst Control Center.  Only the Game of the Year Edition of Batman: Arkham Asylum supports in-game AA settings for both Radeon and GeForce cards.

The only thing that we are not certain of is if 8xQ AA is being properly applied in the Nvidia control panel when it is disabled in the game’s settings as we are getting higher framerates than usual with our GTX 480s.  Normally, the HD 5870 will completely equal the GTX 480’s framerates with no anti-aliasing.  We shall explore this in an upcoming review of the Game of the Year Edition of Batman: Arkham Asylum.  For Nvidia’s setting to more nearly equal AMD’s 8xMSAA, we (supposedly) used 8xQ in the Nvidia control panel, beginning with 2560×1600 resolution:

We are uncertain if AA is being applied by the Nvidia Control Panel when it is disabled in-game.  However, in each case, all 4 cards are able to offer similar playing experiences as the minimums are sufficiently high even at 2560×1600 with details maxed and with 8xMSAA applied.  1920×1200 can only be faster:

There is absolutely no problem playing this game fully maxed out with any of our top videocard configurations with AA forced in video card’s control panels.  Only the uncertainty of the way AA is applied in Nvidia’s control panel keeps us from declaring any winner.