Batman: Arkham Asylum Enables AA Only on NVIDIA Hardware on PCs

[wahdangun]

Well if nVidia was the one that paid for the AA optimizations to be put in the game, I see no problem with them limitting them to nVidia hardware also.

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?

wtf, are you talking about, we are paying our hard earned money for their game you know, but what they do? instead working it more playable to other hardware, they chose to crippled the game so they can take some money.

and no it's not about game stability, it's just one fucking greedy developer. look at the news, they just change device ID and viola AA worked flawlessly(and crush nvdia performance) it's just like :

IF device ID=ATI then
{
AA=disable
}


they should mention it in the box that's say "it's for Nvdia card only" so ATI owner card won't get pissed, ypu know

 

[tkpenalty]

I was explaing why implementing DX10.1 is costly in the first place, as you seem to believe that it comes free. In the Ubisoft case, they didn't say they removed it because it was costly, their reason for removing it was because it made the game unstable. In that case, it had nothing to do with being costly to implement(though it might have been costly to fix the implementation...).

The stability issues with nVidia cards was due to PhysX mostly. I'm sure there were plenty of stability issue with ATi cards, but they were drastically overshadowed by the PhysX issues. It might have come down to a decision of what features to fix, and which features to just give up on. Sometimes that is what has to be done in the business world.

The patch definitely made the game more stable on both side, but no game is ever going to be perfect. There will always be crashes on certain configurations.

The API's functionality was removed altogether after one patch, then DX10.1 stopped working after that. You CLEARLY dont understand what the recent APIs have been written for if you say its costly to implement. DX10.1 and DX11 both are to make life easier for coders so its illogical why they'd fall back on DX10.

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.

Well tell to ATI to invest more in the development and refinement of the drivers.

The biggest problem is the fact, ATI drivers has always been poor and bad at this point they would be like nvidia or even higher.

ATI GPU with tremendous computing power but they are too lazy to develop drivers able to exploit.

I would say to stop the childish acting fanboyism " i hate nvidia" etc. ...

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.

 

[entropy13]

I was explaing why implementing DX10.1 is costly in the first place, as you seem to believe that it comes free. In the Ubisoft case, they didn't say they removed it because it was costly, their reason for removing it was because it made the game unstable. In that case, it had nothing to do with being costly to implement(though it might have been costly to fix the implementation...).

The stability issues with nVidia cards was due to PhysX mostly. I'm sure there were plenty of stability issue with ATi cards, but they were drastically overshadowed by the PhysX issues. It might have come down to a decision of what features to fix, and which features to just give up on. Sometimes that is what has to be done in the business world.

The patch definitely made the game more stable on both side, but no game is ever going to be perfect. There will always be crashes on certain configurations.

BAAAAHHH My head is hurting. I'll rearrange my thoughts first, formulate a proper argument. It should also be mentioned that ATi was pushing for DirectX 10.1 support to stay...but if the stability issues were universal as you point out, then why do they do so? Hmmm....

 

[Imsochobo]

Well tell to ATI to invest more in the development and refinement of the drivers.

The biggest problem is the fact, ATI drivers has always been poor and bad at this point they would be like nvidia or even higher.

ATI GPU with tremendous computing power but they are too lazy to develop drivers able to exploit.

I would say to stop the childish acting fanboyism " i hate nvidia" etc. ...

My job says diffrent.
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.

 

[newtekie1]

wtf, are you talking about, we are paying our hard earned money for their game you know, but what they do? instead working it more playable to other hardware, they chose to crippled the game so they can take some money.

and no it's not about game stability, it's just one fucking greedy developer. look at the news, they just change device ID and viola AA worked flawlessly(and crush nvdia performance) it's just like :

IF device ID=ATI then
{
AA=disable
}


they should mention it in the box that's say "it's for Nvdia card only" so ATI owner card won't get pissed, ypu know

Yes, and you got the game you paid for. However, you didn't get the optimizations that nVidia paid for.(Using reasoning 1 here).

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.

The API's functionality was removed altogether after one patch, then DX10.1 stopped working after that.

Get back on topic will ya? Personal question, are you a conservative person?

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.

 

[cauby]

I really don't see any reason why to be pissed off about this if you can just enable AA on CCC.Sure,there might have a hit in performance,but if it works then it's fine for me....

 

[tkpenalty]

Yes, and you got the game you paid for. However, you didn't get the optimizations that nVidia paid for.(Using reasoning 1 here).

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.

Very conservative there only being so mindful for the corporations when the wealth will never get to you. In the end the consumer loses.

 

[Imsochobo]

Yes, and you got the game you paid for. However, you didn't get the optimizations that nVidia paid for.(Using reasoning 1 here).

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.

 

[entropy13]

I really don't see any reason why to be pissed off about this if you can just enable AA on CCC.Sure,there might have a hit in performance,but if it works then it's fine for me....

Well the majority who may be playing the game would be badly hit in forcing AA (like me in CoH for example, forced 4x AA is unplayable - less than 20fps most of the time during the built-in benchmark-, compared to 4x AA in-game - around 40 fps most of the time in the benchmark).

And before I be branded an ATi fanboy, I had an Nvidia GeForce 6600 for 4 years.

 

[tkpenalty]

¨
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...

 

[DaedalusHelios]

Get back on topic will ya? Personal question, are you a conservative person?

Leave personal questions to PM's. Also the terms conservative and liberal are different for Aussies because their politics are different there.

Maybe you were getting different information because the sites were blocked by the ACMA. j/k

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1888011,00.html

¨nvidia's strategy is bigger, but they also bribes as it seems like with the result in some TWIMTBP games.

And I bribe online retailers to send me products in the checkout process. BRIBES! BRIBES! I TELL YOU!!!

 

[btarunr]

wtf, are you talking about, we are paying our hard earned money for their game you know, but what they do? instead working it more playable to other hardware, they chose to crippled the game so they can take some money.

and no it's not about game stability, it's just one fucking greedy developer. look at the news, they just change device ID and viola AA worked flawlessly(and crush nvdia performance) it's just like :

IF device ID=ATI then
{
AA=disable
}


they should mention it in the box that's say "it's for Nvdia card only" so ATI owner card won't get pissed, ypu know

That's a convincing argument. If you're an ATI owner, Batman: AA is lesser worth its price for you, because not only will you not be able to use the PhysX effects (because ATI GPUs can't accelerate it), but also that its in-game AA won't work (even though the feature works perfectly fine on ATI hardware). Since there's no mention on the box that you need NVIDIA GPUs to be able to use the in-game AA, it's also misleading.

 

[Imsochobo]

And before I be branded an ATi fanboy, I had an Nvidia GeForce 6600 for 4 years.

I have/have had:
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.

 

[AsRock]

So i may as well get it for the PS3 then ? lol. I remember some what the same thing with Oblivion when it was released were ATI cards could do HDR and AA were as Nv card could not at the time so they stopped the ATI cards from being able to do it.

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.

 

[Sihastru]

So much misplaced anger, rage, mouth foaming rage... I don't see any of these fanboys attacking any other company in this way.

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.

 

[laszlo]

Maybe it's just a bug that will be resolved in the next patch

good one

is a green bug but the red insecticide will kill it ...

 

[btarunr]

So much misplaced anger, rage, mouth foaming rage... I don't see any of these fanboys attacking any other company in this way.

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.

So much for misinformed arguments. AMD tested the in-game AA, and it worked. So regardless of this AA implementation being a standard between NVIDIA and AMD, it works, and was yet disabled for ATI hardware.

 

[Ahhzz]

I just wonder how many of the people here, as well as in the industry, who are complaining about the 'business practices' of NVIDIA, are the same ones who think M$'s (for example) operating practices and Intel's are just fine...

 

[Imsochobo]

HEhe, i dont like MS, therefore, only thing running MS are gaming platforms, i got no other choice.
I buy AMD for the intel reason.
I use Linux for everything else, suits me JUUUUUUUUUUST fine
And ati got a open source support there aswell.

 

[[I.R.A]_FBi]

I just wonder how many of the people here, as well as in the industry, who are complaining about the 'business practices' of NVIDIA, are the same ones who think M$'s (for example) operating practices and Intel's are just fine...

smoke and mirrors

 

[btarunr]

In the demo, but how do we know it doesn't cause a problem further along in the game, as I've already pointed out? They haven't tested more than 15 minutes of gameplay and we all assume it works through the entire game.

How many times have we played a game, that worked fine through 3-4 hours of gameplay, then suddenly crashes at the exact same spot no matter what we do? I know I've had it happen several times in the many years I've been playing. In games as recently released as a few months ago. It is actually pretty common in newly released game, as the drivers haven't been fixed yet. The solution is often to disable some visual feature(because the drivers don't like it), or to wait for better drivers.

We don't know that this isn't the case here. Instead, some are jumping to the conclusion that because it has an nVidia stamp on it, that nVidia disabled the feature for ATi. We don't know that. And frankly for a news reporter to even suggest it without any shred of proof completely removes all credibility that new reporter has.

That really isn't a problem. Whether the feature 'works' or not on the given hardware is all that matters, and it does. Stability issues is cannot be used as an excuse to completely remove the feature. If stability issues did exist, they should have left the feature available to everyone and worked on them. Besides, the game does not advertise that its AA features don't work on ATI hardware (or that it requires NVIDIA hardware for AA, just like it properly advertises PhysX).

 

[wahdangun]

Yes, and you got the game you paid for. However, you didn't get the optimizations that nVidia paid for.(Using reasoning 1 here).

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.

then they don't deserve our money (using reasoning no.1)

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.

 

[Ahhzz]

smoke and mirrors

 

[Sihastru]

So much for misinformed arguments. AMD tested the in-game AA, and it worked. So regardless of this AA implementation being a standard between NVIDIA and AMD, it works, and was yet disabled for ATI hardware.

Again, does it work on an Intel GPU? A test made in-house by the developer company QA department is much better conducted, then a quick test run. Testing one or two or three cards does not qualify for a PASS. We can make many assumptions, some can be true, most can be false.

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.

 

[Mussels]

Well if nVidia was the one that paid for the AA optimizations to be put in the game, I see no problem with them limitting them to nVidia hardware also.

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?

despite your trying to use rational logic, you umm, failed.
http://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.

This is common knowledge. Been discussed before.

BTW AA isn't an added feature...it's a standard.

Indeed. and a default feature of the engine used.

ATI GPUs can handle that game's in-game AA, this comes from AMD. The game just disables the feature when it sees an AMD GPU. This is total blasphemy. I'm not going to / can't tell you what you should choose with your wallets, but I'll tell you what my wallet says.

"no Batman Arkham Asylum for GeForce for you, bta."

evil wallet.

indeed. i went RE5 over this, due to this lame issue.

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.

unfortunately, the lack of AA will never make it into enough news to hinder sales that much.