The developers and Nvidia disabled AA for ATI cards, I didn't buy at release for this reason and I won't buy now at 50% off.
Correction, the developers and nVidia added AA for nVidia cards at nVidia's expense, and you won't buy it because you feel ATi should get extra features that they didn't help develop in any way.
They did NOT have AA disabled they payed to have it added.. Although as i have heard on these forums other things are not there when your not using a nV card. Hence when i i had seen the offer yesterday i passed it up because last thing i want to promote is for the game makers to not add what we normally get even without a nV card.
Not true at all. I've played through the game on both my ATi and nVidia cards, and everything that was there on the nVidia card was there on the ATi card.
Enabling higher levels of PhysX, which enabled the hardware accelerated PhysX that only runs on nVidia cards, adds things to the game, but that is what hardware accelerated PhysX does. You can even have those things with strictly an ATi setup, but then the elements that are supposed to be hardware accelerated by the GPU are run on the CPU, and performance is in the shitter. But again, that is the same argument as with the AA, nVidia paid for the developement of PhysX and for the integration into their GPUs, and ATi did not.
AA is something I expect as standard, irrespective of the card I am using and engine choice doesn't satisfy me as an excuse: if Nvidia Hardware has AA on a title, ATI hardware should also have AA. I think there is more to it than simply paying to have AA included: as you point out, they removed various software physics effects when an ATI card is detected, why would AA be any different? In any event, we agree that the game is to be avoided as a result of Nvidia/developer shenanigans. We will never be fully aware of the exact nature of the transaction that took place between Nvidia and the developer, but I can happily blame them both and avoid this title.
ATi hardware has AA, it is just FSAA enabled through CCC, if you want AA enabled it through CCC just like we all do with any game that doesn't have native AA support(and there are a lot, even recent big name games). The in-game AA was MSAA developed by nVidia for Batman, which gives virtually no performance impact when enabled. It was nVidia that paid for this to be developed and implemented in the game, there is no reason ATi should benefit from it. If nVidia did not pay for the developement time to include AA, the game would have had no AA option at all.
And as I already pointed out, they did not remove any physics effects when an ATi card is detected, they just move where the calculations are performed from the GPU to the CPU.
