DX11: Batman: Arkham City

If there was ever a game that showcased the growing gap between game consoles and high-end gaming PCs, Batman: Arkham City is it. In this dystopian near-future, part of Gotham City has been walled off as an enclave for criminals (rather like Escape from New York). It's a 3d-person action game that adheres to story line previously set forth in Batman: Arkham Asylum, and is based on an updated Unreal Engine 3 game engine. Batman: Arkham City is a DirectX 11 title that uses multi-threaded rendering to produce life-like tessellation effects.

One annoyance with the game is that all game settings must be made through a hidden application called "BMLauncher". Once you've made your settings, though, an in-game benchmark provides the feedback you'll need to tune your system's performance.

• Batman: Arkham City
  • FXAA (medium), DirectX 11 features, medium tessellation, medium Detail, Dynamic Shadows, Motion Blur, Distortion, Lens Flares, Light Shafts, Reflections, Ambient Occlusion, PhysX off

The AMD Radeon graphics cards are at a disadvantage here, since, like Arkham Asylum, Arkham City is a showcase of PhysX effects, which can be directly accelerated by NVIDIA cards but not by AMD cards. I left PhysX turned off for this test but if your Radeon-equipped rig is running an Intel 2500K or higher processor, consider turning it on: the PhysX will run on the CPU but modern multi-core CPUs have enough power to do a credible job, and you'll miss out on some really cool effects otherwise.

The HD7770 matches the performance of the HD 6850 here.

Cost Analysis: Arkham City (1920x1200)

Test Summary: Careful coding and design of the Arkham City graphics engine means that even lower-end video cards can produce playable frame rates at high resolutions.

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