AMD Radeon HD 7950 Tahiti Pro DirectX 11 GPU Review

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, January 31, 2012, 12:01 AM EDT

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Batman: Arkham City Performance

Batman: Arkham City

DirectX Gaming Performance

Batman: Arkham City

Batman: Arkham City is a sequel to 2009’s Game of the Year winning Batman: Arkham Asylum. This recently released sequel, however, lives up to and even surpasses the original. The story takes place 18 months after the original game. Quincy Sharp, the onetime administrator of Arkham Asylum, has become mayor and convinced Gotham to create "Arkham City" by walling off the worst, most crime-ridden areas of the city and turning the area into a giant open-air prison. The game has DirectX 9 and 11 rendering paths, with support for tessellation, multi-view soft shadows, and ambient occlusion. We tested in DX11 mode with all in-game graphical options set to their maximum values, at various resolutions.

Although the framerates are somewhat lower, Batman: Arkham City tells essentially the same story as Just Cause 2. In this game, the Radeon HD 7950 pulls ahead of the reference GeForce GTX 580 once the resolution is cranked up to 2560x1600, but the 7950 can't match the 3GB GeForce GTX 580, regardless of resolution.

From this point forward, we'll also be testing CrossFire and SLI performance with the Single-GPU powered cards. Unfortunately, in this first test with Batman:AC CrossFire is essentially broken. We saw some visual anomalies with the game's menu system, but the benchmark itself produced good visuals. However, performance doesn't scale properly on the Radeons.