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
thats fucked up man, I have an nvidia card right now, but thats just bs
bad for the devs too
and changing the cards device ID via flashing is not easy to do for novices and always voids your warranty,
this is really anticompetitive stuff they are doing, but they have done it before I think so. . . . .
But I have an Nvidia card XD
It does not retard the ATi card. It just makes sure certain optimizations only can be used as developed for Nvidia's offerings.
If two computers, one ATi and one Nvidia, both don't have the box checked there is no difference. Thats why your statement "cannot hold water" as they say.
That is just absolute abuse of whats supposed to be keeping piracy at bay. Again Nvidia tries to grab more shareholders through fabricated crap. Nice damage minimisation by nvidia, but a nice way to get into court as well. Normally its due to hardware reasons, but this isnt the case.
I'll just pirate this game.
Anyhoo.... no anger. Just not going to buy the game. Done.
Nvidia can do it and we might not like it but its nothing illegal just a bit sad.
Its like buying the last cake so that your mate cant have it even though you are full up.
nvidia are just being arseholes!
i am no fanboy for graphics cards i use whatever is the best value at the time and last time it happend to be the gtx 260
I get most games bundled free from videocard purchases so I really don't pay either.
Just another day in the office.
Ah well, I only have time for a bit of CS source once in a while anyway.
Someone once said in a forum once that Nvidia's CEO was kinda like Mao, I wonder....hmmmmmmmm.
I don't believe for a second that there was something about this game that didn't allow it to run AA just FINE on ATI hardware, especially considering (like one poster pointed out) it's an Xbox port. :shadedshu
AC had DX 10.1 and under it, it ran better on ATI hardware, then in a later "patch", directX 10.1 support was removed under the reason on "being unstable".
For all we know, if nVidia didn't put the money in to implement the AA optimizations, we would never have seen them in the game, so why should ATi benefit from that?
It might not be a case of nVidia or the game developers removing a feature, but instead a case of nVidia paying to have the feature added in the first place.
These could have been performance optimizations that nVidia entirely paid for, the whole purpose of TWIMTBP program, so why should then enable them for ATi?
Or a completely different reasoning:
It could be that having it enabled with ATi cards causes problems in the retail game(remember they only tested this on the demo). For all we know, something with the way ATi cards handles AA causes the game to crash or be extremely buggy with the optimized AA enabled. Maybe a certain part of the game is completely unplayable on ATi cards with the feature enabled, so the developers(nothing to do with nVidia at all) just gave up trying to fix it, and simply disabled the feature on ATi cards as a quick fix to get the game shipped. They now have more time to work on a patch to make it work. It wouldn't be the first time we've seen games have problems with one manufacturer, but not the other, due to certain visual elements conflicting with the current drivers.
Either way, I highly doubt nVidia caused a feature that was already in the game to be disabled.How do you know this?