NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Review

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 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.

The driver NVIDIA provided with the GeForce GTX 780 (which wouldn't install on older cards, BTW), seemed to improve minimum framerates in Batman dramatically. Average frame rates fall right where'd you expect, with the GeForce GTX 780 outpacing the GeForce GTX 680 here, but trailing the Titan by a slightly. And yes, CrossFire is still broken in this game, but we continue to use it to hammer that point home.


Captured @ 1920x1200 - Click For An Enlarged View

There were no issues with frame pacing to speak of with Batman with the single GPU configurations we tested. That large spike you see is a scene transition and nothing to be concerned about.


Captured @ 1920x1200 - Click For An Enlarged View

Save for a few additional spikes, there were no major issues with frame times with the multi-GPU configurations either. Of course, CrossFire wasn't working here, so the Radeons' results are similar to the single-GPU data posted above.
 


Marco Chiappetta

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com

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