Tuesday, September 29th 2009
Batman: Arkham Asylum Enables AA Only on NVIDIA Hardware on PCs
Anti-Aliasing has been one of the most basic image-quality enhancements available in today's games. PC graphics hardware manufacturers regard it as more of an industry standard, and game developers echo with them, by integrating anti-aliasing (AA) features in the game, as part of its engine. This allows the game to selectively implement AA in parts of the 3D scene, so even as the overall image quality of the scene is improved, so is performance, by making sure that not every object in the scene is given AA. It seems that in one of the most well marketed games of the year, Batman: Arkham Asylum, doesn't like to work with ATI Radeon graphics cards when it comes to its in-game AA implementation.
Developed under NVIDIA's The Way it's Meant to be Played program, and featuring NVIDIA's PhysX technology, the game's launcher disables in-game AA when it detects AMD's ATI Radeon graphics hardware. AMD's Ian McNaughton in his recent blog thread said that they had confirmed this by an experiment where they ran ATI Radeon hardware under changed device IDs. Says McNaughton: "Additionally, the in-game AA option was removed when ATI cards are detected. We were able to confirm this by changing the ids of ATI graphics cards in the Batman demo. By tricking the application, we were able to get in-game AA option where our performance was significantly enhanced." He further adds that the option is not available for the retail game as there is a secure-rom.
With no in-game AA available to ATI Radeon users, although the features do technically work on ATI Radeon hardware, the only way AA can be used is by forcing it in Catalyst Control Center. This causes the driver to use AA on every 3D object in the scene, reducing performance, compared to if the game's in-game AA engine is used. "To fairly benchmark this application, please turn off all AA to assess the performance of the respective graphics cards. Also, we should point out that even at 2560×1600 with 4x AA and 8x AF we are still in the highly playable territory," McNaughton adds. Choose with your wallets.
Developed under NVIDIA's The Way it's Meant to be Played program, and featuring NVIDIA's PhysX technology, the game's launcher disables in-game AA when it detects AMD's ATI Radeon graphics hardware. AMD's Ian McNaughton in his recent blog thread said that they had confirmed this by an experiment where they ran ATI Radeon hardware under changed device IDs. Says McNaughton: "Additionally, the in-game AA option was removed when ATI cards are detected. We were able to confirm this by changing the ids of ATI graphics cards in the Batman demo. By tricking the application, we were able to get in-game AA option where our performance was significantly enhanced." He further adds that the option is not available for the retail game as there is a secure-rom.
With no in-game AA available to ATI Radeon users, although the features do technically work on ATI Radeon hardware, the only way AA can be used is by forcing it in Catalyst Control Center. This causes the driver to use AA on every 3D object in the scene, reducing performance, compared to if the game's in-game AA engine is used. "To fairly benchmark this application, please turn off all AA to assess the performance of the respective graphics cards. Also, we should point out that even at 2560×1600 with 4x AA and 8x AF we are still in the highly playable territory," McNaughton adds. Choose with your wallets.
353 Comments on Batman: Arkham Asylum Enables AA Only on NVIDIA Hardware on PCs
That being said, I'd wait to hear more information before nay saying Nvidia. Let it be known that I was an ATI owner for YEARS before becoming fed up with certain quality issues never being resolved and finally switched to Nvidia about two years ago. As it stands now Nvidia has far more to offer the consumer in terms of overall features and upgraded paths than ATI does. Who stands to benefit the most from a sucker punch?
Just my opinion but I trust no company and am always skeptical when I see something like this...
Needs AA enabled ;)
well see what comes about this, all i know is when i tried to play batman on my system..has a ati card..it would blue screen it....NO game blue screens my computer...i dont even understand it myself, ive reinstalled and everything. but whatever.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_in_the_game
I mean no offense to any Batman enthusiasts here BTW.
Anyone know what might happen if i try to run this program?
So,the conclusions i can draw after reading those 9 pages is that either Nvidia is a big bad company who doesn't like to play fair or ATI is full of incopetent people.There's another thing which I think is more reasonable:if Nvidia put their money helping in the development of better features for the game(in-game AA and Phsyx),then why would it share it with ATI?Is there a rule anywhere saying that it should?
Just get a 30" monitor with 2560 * 1600 resolution and sit back several feet and FSAA just won't matter much at all.
Anyhow I think doing just about anything proprietary on an open platform is a bad way of doing business. What ever happened to Glide and 3Dfx? Let Nvidia and their Cuda simply fall off a cliff since the future will bring a better way of doing things anyhow. I've supported ATI for a long time now and have not bought a Nvidia video card since my 8800 GTX. I remember the first AMD Athlon and what it stood for. It meant that some other people existed out there that could do the same thing as the current king of the hill and do it at a better value and do it with creative thinking and a better product. I think ATI/AMD is doing that again right now especially on the graphics front and the way games like Crysis and the likes seem to want to sleep only with Nvidia hardware makes me angry. I'll probably still buy Arkham Asylum but there is no way in hell I'm gonna buy an Nvidia GPU to see FSAA done the "right" way. :toast:
i hate gaming without AA, its the whole reason i have overkill graphics cards.the engine supports it, its just that on nvidia card DX10 rendering is normally required to use it.
ATI could always run it, with a few odd glitches when HDR was used at the same time.
www.pcbuyersguide.co.za/showthread.php?t=6757
all thats happened here, is that nvidia took tweaking to get it to work and ATI didnt, but instead of just letting ATI run they "hid" the option to make their sponsors look better.
I definitely wont be buying this game due to this bullshit. I was planning on upgrading my folding rigs (2 of them) to 260/216's but thats not going to happen either. I hope Stanford gets the ATi clients right and us ATi guys will finally be able to see some decent PPD associated with our hardware.