AMD Radeon HD 7990 Review: The Quiet Beast
Batman: Arkham City Performance
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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 in many ways. 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 at various resolutions with all in-game graphical options set to their maximum values. |
We'll be pulling this game from the test suite soon, but are including our results here for two reasons. 1) To show you how all of the cards we tested performed relative to one another. And 2) to illustrate another issue that AMD is yet to resolve with their driver (and are likely to never resolve). The Radeon HD 7990 (and other Radeon HD CrossFire configurations) does not scale properly in this game when running in DX 11 mode, so the card performs right in-line with the single-GPU powered Radeon HD 7970. The second GPU and half the frame buffer on the 7990 are wasted here.
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Don't mind the huge spike in the frame time plot above--that's a scene transition that we happened to capture in the section of the game that we recorded. And since the Radeon HD 7990 was essentially acting as a single-GPU powered card here, the frame pacing issues associated with CrossFire didn't come into play.
