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| Batman: Arkham City |
| DirectX 11 Gaming 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. 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.
Batman: Arkham City is sort of the poster child these days for a leading-edge game engine that not only looks great but employs some higher end effects and rendering techniques. In DX11 mode, the Ivy Bridge Intel HD 4000 graphics engine can't keep pace with the discrete GeForce GPU and drops back significantly. However, Intel's Ivy Bridge graphics core actually beats their previous generation graphics core while running in DX11 mode, versus the Sandy Bridge running DX9. Turn down the load to DX9 on Ivy Bridge and once again we see a 2X performance increase between the two Intel architectures. Impressive.
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.
