Batman: Arkham City follows the well-received Batman: Arkham Asylum and brings with it some new challenges for Batman and better graphics for us. Hitman Absolution is one of the newest games in our benchmark pool and is murder on most gaming PCs. Both games offer DX11 code paths and advanced graphics technologies, including tessellation.
 |
|
Batman: Arkham City |
|
DX11 Gaming Performance |
|
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, and we even turned on NVIDIA PhysX in the game engine to ramp up the visuals and work the little alien speedster a bit harder.
Batman seems to like Radeon setups, and in particular that 7990 single-card dual-GPU job. Still, the VIRTUE delivered very impressive scores.
|
|
Hitman: Absolution |
|
DX11 Gaming Performance |
|
Our final game benchmark of the review is of Hitman, the blockbuster game that follows an assassin as he finds himself become a target. Here we have no other systems to compare it to compare it to as yet.
The VIRTUE delivered solid but not knockout performance in Hitman, putting it right next to the AVADirect system but a good step or two behind the CyberPowerPC rig.
