Batman: Arkham City PC Game Preview
PhysX in Batman: Arkham City
Batman: Arkham City utilizes Nvidia’s PhysX technology in elements of the game to create a more realistic physics-based experience.
- With PhysX set to “Off,” the player will experience the game much like on the XBox 360 – without any PhysX effects
- With PhysX set to “Normal,” the player will experience exploding particles, fluid smoke and destructible elements.
- At the “High” PhysX setting, the user experiences real time cloth and paper simulation like leaflets, trash and money.
These settings can be adjusted by adjusting the “Hardware Accelerated PhysX” option in the Batman Arkham City launcher options. Each produces a different level of in-game effects and each has increased hardware requirements.
Particle PhysX effects are everywhere in Batman: Arkham City to intensify dramatic scenes.
Examples of PhysX include ice debris particles that shoot from the Freeze Gun and shattering ice from Freeze Grenades as well as sparks and interactive smoke. Breakable glass is another noticeable feature as are debris and steam – this all adds to the game’s atmosphere.
With PhysX enabled and set to “High”, the money littering the floor in the vault reacts to character and weapon movement in real-time.
We also see realistically moving curtains, museum tickets, posters, and office papers as well as clothing moving more naturally. Without PhysX, clothing is a lot stiffer and it does not move naturally.
Did we mention breaking glass?
FXAA
FXAA is a shader based image filter developed by Nvidia which reduces visible aliasing. It is applied along with other post processing steps like motion blur and bloom. For game engines making use of deferred shading, FXAA provides for less of a performance and memory hit over using deferred shading with MSAA. Not only does FXAA cost less in terms of a performance hit, but the visual difference is very clear over not using it at all.
Tessellation in Batman: Arkham City
Batman: Arkham City offers support for DirectX 11 tessellation which is a good way to increase the level of detail in a scene.
Look very carefully at the tessellation on the vine set to “high” (no, not there! – at the vine below) and compare the three levels of tessellation from left to right: none, normal and high.
Since Epic added support for DX11 tessellation to the Unreal Engine, Rocksteady also used DX11 tessellation in Batman: Arkham City for displacement mapping and smoothing on characters and environments. Displacement mapping adds fine geometric detail to a mesh using data sourced from textures. This means the artist can more easily set up complex displacement-mapping effects, such as animations.
Mesh smoothing adds tessellated triangles to break up harsh angular outlines. The technique used in Batman: Arkham City is based on a watertight variant of PN triangles and it is applied on objects which should appear sinuous or organic, such as power cables, pipes and trees.
Of course there are many other DX11 tessellation points of interest in Batman: Arkham City including, Virtual Dicing, Mip-Mapping, Multi View Soft Shadows (MVSS), and Horizon-Based Ambient Occlusion (HBAO). The visual result is a real-time lighting and shadow placement solution that takes depth in account while being smoothed by a blur kernel which gives the player a realistic effect.
Combining all of these features creates an impressive cinematic look to Batman: Arkham City and immerses the gamer into Batman’s dark world.
3D Vision
3D Vision offers a more immersive stereoscopic 3D experience over playing the game in 2D. A combination of high-tech wireless glasses and advanced software, 3D Vision’s drivers automatically transforms over 500 PC games into full stereoscopic 3D. I n addition, you can watch Blu-ray 3D, view 3D digital photographs, and even stream YouTube 3D videos.
NVIDIA 3D Vision 2
3D Vision 2 is the next generation of Nvidia’s stereoscopic 3D technology and features a number of new innovations.
The first innovation is new active shutter glasses that have larger lenses and improved materials. The second innovation is LightBoost which delivers brighter 3D screen images and richer color quality than existing display technologies.
Cut-scenes are in 3D
All of the elements of Batman: Arkham City are in 3D. This includes everything from the interactive 3D character portraits to every in-game cut-scene. The in-game cut-scenes are rendered in full HD 1080p 3D video for the highest quality cinematics. The characters from the Batman: Arkham City universe come alive in stereoscopic 3D Vision.
Using 3D Depth
According to Nvidia, with real time depth information being delivered via 3D Vision, the gamer has an advantage when gauging certain aspects of Batman: Arkham City.
Nvidia claims that the large environments and sandbox style interaction with the world of Arkham City make the S3D benefits especially noticeable since 3D Vision gives 3D gamers the tools to interact with the environment in a way that 2D gamers cannot. This is something that we will play particular attention to in our 3D Vision evaluation of Batman: Arkham City.
Of course, there is a performance penalty for playing with 3D Vision. The expected performance when running the built in benchmark with 3D Vision enabled at 1920×1080 resolution, FXAA High, DX11 Disabled, and PhysX High is 33.8 fps for the GTX 560 Ti and 36.5 for the GTX 570.
Let’s look at the game’s system requirements as well as the more specific recommendations for playing with GeForce cards and playable settings with PhysX and 3D Vision
