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Batman: Arkham Asylum

Graphical Masterpiece

Batman: Arkham Asylum looks excellent. There is tons of character detail, incredibly well designed play area and the animation is remarkably good, especially for combat. Even at times when Arkham Asylum falls back to canned videos to carry the story, they fit the in-engine stuff perfectly as they are rendered to look the same. To be honest, only the slightly lower-than-1920x1200 resolution betrayed them as videos to me.

Characters show incredible detail at higher settings.

Most play areas are fairly large and filled with detail.

Granted, Arkham Asylum looked excellent even on the consoles, and PC version goes even beyond that. While the different versions appear to use identical assets, PC version can be played at a higher resolution and on a modern system it looks much better. At the same time, this being Unreal Engine, the game gracefully downgrades the visuals all the way down to a level that does actually run on just about any piece of video hardware that supports Shader Model 3.0. The lowest setting, designed for low end cards with 256MB memory, does get ugly, especially with the characters, so our recommendation is a fair bit higher, but in any case as long as your hardware supports Shader Model 3.0, Arkham Asylum will work. On the CPU side, you want a dual core processor, but beyond that the game isn't that picky about your CPU resources and the video card is what matters the most.

Very High - everything maxed, runs on the YouGamers recommended setup.	High settings - missing out Ambient Occlusion.
Medium - runs fine on the YouGamers minimum configuration.	Lowest ugly mode for those marginal SM3.0 cards.

The YouGamers minimum is what in our opinion you need to run the game at medium settings - you will miss out on Ambient Occlusion, some lighting effects and the highest textures, but even without those the game still looks quite pretty.

The Way It Is Meant To Be Played?

Arkham Asylum is a big showcase title for NVIDIA and PhysX. For best results with "High" PhysX effects enabled, the game suggests a GTX 260 + a dedicated GeForce 9800 GTX or better for PhysX calculations and it appears to be an accurate recommendation, ensuring that you see no framerate loss when compared to running without PhysX effects. However, Arkham Asylum runs fine even on a lesser system. Our recommended configuration is what you need to run the game at maximum settings (including PhysX enabled at "Normal" when running on NVIDIA hardware). That's right - even if the configuration page recommends that you should have a GTX 260 or better to enable PhysX at all, a lone GeForce 9800 GTX appears to do the job, even if you do get some framerate dips to below 30fps and you really can't use the AA without bogging things down. The thing is, Arkham Asylum gameplay just is not that sensitive to framerate dips.

Extra PhysX effects are not critical to the gameplay, but they sure bring a lot of atmosphere.

Scarecrow will push Batman to the brink of madness (and he's good at showing off PhysX).

On ATI hardware, things look marginally worse as you lose all GPU-only PhysX effects. Gameplay is unaffected and on the visual side, you then get exactly the same thing as on the consoles, still running at a better framerate and higher resolution. According to third party reports you also lose proper AA with ATI cards - NVIDIA specifically supplied code to enable proper edge AA, but only when running on NVIDIA hardware. ATI users can still force AA from the drivers, but the performance will take a pounding. Nothing really prevents from edge AA from working on ATI cards as well, but I guess when NVIDIA lends a hand with the graphics code, NVIDIA gets to put in little "If not NVIDIA, then no shiny" checks as well. Of course nothing would prevent ATI from doing the exact same thing - and they really should, as far too often there are games that "just work" on NVIDIA at launch while on ATI hardware you have to wait for a driver update or two to get the same results.

In summary - yes, there is a noticeable advantage when using a modern NVIDIA card - you get better AA and PhysX visual enhancements, but the game looks great also on ATI hardware and you are not missing out on anything that truly affects the gameplay.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Gameplay, cont.Page 4: Visuals, PerformancePage 5: Summary, Scoring

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