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
Get back on topic will ya? Personal question, are you a conservative person?
Before any fanboy comment is fired off, im using an 8800GT. Not going to go for nvidia for my next GPU however, due to their draconian market practises.Totally irrelevant. In this case, the drivers are not the issue, but the game basically prevents AA in game from working whenever it detects an ATI card. As shown the developers easily averted this by changing the devID, and hence proves thats its nothing to do with the drivers.
On this note I've been having way more issues with Nvidia's drivers than AMD's drivers.
Its not fanboyism. Its a logical fallacy to assume that because AA doesnt work in this case AMD's drivers suck.
IT people want to move away from nvidia due to driver issues.
Quadro is more a standard, therefore the bosses like it, strange company yes.
ATI in all laptops though, not an issue.
Ati drivers always been poor?
I cant say that.
I cant say ati should invest in developing games, then it turns out to be a money game rather than making just a product that supports a API that game devs use and then we're done.
Not pay for making AA being supported in games.
Pay so you wont get crippled performance.
Not Pay so the game works as it can, just because you didnt pay the dev.
Or you got a game that crashes halfway through(using reasoning 2). Would you prefer to pay for a game that won't let you finish it?
And if you read the article, it didn't crush nVidia's performance, in performed a lot worse with AA enabled, while nVidia cards see no performance loss.Yes, and that might have been an dicision made to help fix stability in a very unstable game.
Personal answer, generally I don't like to make baseless statements, and tend to argue and play devil's advocate whenever someone else does.
AC didnt crash for me or any of my friends. DX10.1
There was no problem, review sites didnt have issues either.
The fact that you support paying of game devs for other cards to be bad is just unbearable.
Way its meant to be played is perfectly fine if the FACT that the game ran as it should, and not with intentional crippled performance like its proven...
ATi does support game devs, and give videocards to them so they can check if it works, and support them with documentation and alike, nvidia's strategy is bigger, but they also bribes as it seems like with the result in some TWIMTBP games.
And before I be branded an ATi fanboy, I had an Nvidia GeForce 6600 for 4 years.
Maybe you were getting different information because the sites were blocked by the ACMA. j/k
www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1888011,00.html :eek::laugh: And I bribe online retailers to send me products in the checkout process. BRIBES! BRIBES! I TELL YOU!!! :roll:
Riva TNT2.
Geforce 256, Geforce 2MX, Geforce 2 TI, Geforce 3 TI 560(gainward) ,Geforce4 TI 4600, Geforce 6800GT, Geforce 7800GT SLI, Geforce GTX260
Ati Radeon 9800 Pro, X850XTPE, 1950XTX, 2900XT, 3870X2, 4870CF
So same applies to me, so you guys see where most of my money have gone... now im not buying more of nvidia, unless they become a underdog without money so they cant do meant to fail program.
Well thats how i remember reading it on there forums when it was released.
Sad soooo sad maybe people should be sueing nvidia more often. As this sounds totally unfair and the makers of the game need a foot in there ass too.
AA is not an industry standard, it just seems that way. The truth is that AA implementations are very different from company to company. If AA were a standard then ALL cards (ATI, nVidia, Intel, VIA, Matrox) will see the same comparable drop in performance when AA was enabled.
The truth is, they are using completely different ways to implement it, with so many optimizations it's amazing it still produces the same comparable effect. The same can be said about AF and a bunch of other "quality enhancing settings".
I need to know what happens when you play this game on an Intel GPU. Why didn't anyone raised this problem? This is not just a two horse race you know.
Is it really nVidia's fault because you bought an ATI card? Is it ATI's fault because you bought and nVidia card? I don't know, but I do know it is both these companies' fault because you didn't bought a VIA or Matrox card. And if you don't own an ATI or nVidia card, you should take a number for the "screw Intel queue".
When you bought a video card you made a choice. Nobody forced you to do it. Accept it and live with it. Don't be angry if some things might not work as fluently as you think they should.
You guys are so narrow minded. It's like being angry at Ford because one of their engines does not accept the pistons from a VW. I mean, it's a piston, it's a standard...
Another reason because you are narrow minded is because you're ignoring the console market. These days consoles are the priority for the developers. The PC game is just a port. And if a company pays for that port, it wants to see that money being pored into resolving compatibility issues with it's own products, not the competition's.
is a green bug but the red insecticide will kill it ...:laugh:
I buy AMD for the intel reason.
I use Linux for everything else, suits me JUUUUUUUUUUST fine :D
And ati got a open source support there aswell.
do you have a solid proof that the game will crashes halfway through(using reasoning 2).
so i say ATI owner card must boycott this game and rate it so low in every on-line store. so they will suffer 40% loss from us ATI owner.
nVidia could disable the entire game on ATI cards. Why would this be a problem? It's practically their game. It's like Badaboom. It uses CUDA. A game is an application that is geared towards entertainment. PhysX should be reason enough to explain an incompatibility. Apple does it all the time. Takes a random small thing and makes a big deal out of it.
EDIT: btarunr, my post is not a comment to the OP. It's a result of me wasting my time reading all the angry posts after that.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_Arkham_Asylum
note the "unreal engine" ? you see, this game was made from an existing game engine, well known to work on ATI and NVIDIA hardware with antialiasing.
you can also rename the games .exe to UE3.exe from what i hear, and then use catalyst control centers AA (even before the patch) and everything works well.
This is purely a dirty trick from nvidia, since NV only add AA to some things in game, while ATI now has to waste power antialiasing EVERYTHING (taking a performance hit) and inconveniencing end users.Indeed. and a default feature of the engine used.indeed. i went RE5 over this, due to this lame issue.unfortunately, the lack of AA will never make it into enough news to hinder sales that much.
forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=104750