Batman Arkham City Discussion

That is my Birthday!

 

I won't mind waiting for the PC version, given the 20% pre-order discount on Steam (as I have AA there already). It will actually give me a chance to replay AA since I've not picked it up for quite some time.

 

Articles: Exclusive: PhysX In Batman: Arkham City - A First Look - GeForce

Can't wait, Physx does an awesome job like Alice!

 

I'm probably in the minority on this, but I actually really like PhysX. It doesn't always do anything mind blowing, but it adds to the immersion factor, IMO. It's one thing I do miss by not having an NVIDIA GPU.

 

I would just prefer a platform agnostic physics engine that does the same thing. If I buy the game I'll feel tied to nvidia. Doesn't make much sense. I like being able to pick. They need to fix that.

 

That's what Havok is, but I don't believe the Unreal Engine (which these games use) supports it. Or, at the very least, it would have to be coded in, which would take additional time and development dollars.

See, it doesn't make sense to me why you would feel "tied" to a specific GPU maker. It's not as if not having PhysX is causing you to miss out on any content - it's just a few additional visual effects. Not trying to argue with you, just odd you would feel that way is all.

 

Think AC can run decent with 1366x768 (native) resolution on my system?

i7 2630qm
6gb ram
Nvidia 525m?

 

New Arkham City DLC announced!

Spoiler

 

I don't like graphical features locked to specific hardware vendors. I just don't like it.

 

ROFL
10char

 

Hahaha, Good one xD

 

How do you guys like the controls of Arkham Asylum using the keyboard and mouse? I usually prefer the consoles for action games (God of War, Devil May Cry, etc) and Arkham City is supposedly heavier on action and combos so I wonder if it would be better played with a gamepad.

 

I use an Xbox controller for playing Arkham Asylum on the PC. I imagine I'll be doing the same for Arkham City. Never did like the keyboard for playing Arkham Asylum.

 

Nvidia's are really deep in the pocket's of Rocksteady. You'd think Rocksteady would have changed after the fiasco with Arkham Asylum where the game disabled AA when it detected AMD hardware...

Arkham City: Round 2 of Nvidia. Nvidia released PhysX 3 SDK knowing the previous PhysX multi-threading support was purposely broken to screw over anyone who didn't buy Nvidia. PhysX 3 SDK fixed that. But... Rocksteady chose to use an earlier version of PhysX where MT support for AMD users is still broken...

But good news. YOU DO NOT NEED NVIDIA TO PLAY BATMAN AC. All features of PhysX will be available for CPU. Just with broken MT support.

Oh and Batman Arkham City will have tessellation support. And so far all games with Nvidia tessellation support have been Tessellated moron. For example Crysis 2 has tessellated water on EVERYTHING, even on maps with no water at all, invisible to the eye, the GPU is being forced to tessellate water... Batman Arkham City will no doubt have tessellation of flat surfaces and batman's toe nail which you can't inside his boot!

 

Ugh, I think I read Batman AC is delayed until November 25th?

Boo!

 

OMG! That Alfred DLC parody cartoon is so funny that I nearly cried due to the laughter.

Funniest thing I've seen in a while LOL!

--

I'll be using a gamepad as well for this game (Logitech Rumba 2, which is basically a PS3 controller). I'm going to have soooo much fun playing AC!

@masterchef341
I totally agree with you. Always like the option to choose without being persuaded by something like this.

 

According to Steam and Amazon it's now releasing for PC on Nov 22:
Pre-purchase Batman: Arkham City on Steam
Amazon.com: Batman: Arkham City: Pc: Video Games

 

According to Steam and Amazon it's now releasing for PC on Nov 22:
Pre-purchase Batman: Arkham City on Steam
http://www.amazon.com/Batman-Arkham..._3?s=videogames&ie=UTF8&qid=1320546497&sr=1-3

 

Okay, after reviewing the Youtube video comparing PhysX to non-PhysX, it makes me want to use only nVidia for the rest of my life ...lol

Batman: Arkham City NVIDIA GeForce GTX PhysX PC Trailer - YouTube

It's so much more real if playing with a nVidia PhysX ...

The part where Batman sees about 50 criminals in 1 room is going to be so fun if we have to fight them all to get through (at around 0:13)

 

There is plenty of decent physics available to developers outside of PhysX. It's just an exclusive gimmick put on a few games a year to make people say things like you just said.

 

Way to be a Nvidia marketing chump. Eat it up and believe it...

Rocksteady has said, everything that is done on GPU PhysX will be done on CPU... You can google it and read it for yourself. Having an AMD will not decrease the physics in the game.
- But they did choose to use older version of PhysX, strangely since the newer version has better multi-threading support.

Batman Arkham City PhysX DOES NOT REQUIRE HARDWARE PHYSX nor is any feature exclusive to it. It will be the same on both GPU or CPU. Difference might be performance is all. But yes, it's a nice video, but a really deceiving one. Way to fall for Nvidia marketing without doing any research.

For Batman AC, the video itself is pure gimmick. There is no PhysX featured in the game exclusive to hardware acceleration, it will also be available on the CPU. It's pure gimmick, marketing sham video.

Think read on forums someone who pre-orderd it in Europe on Steam saying it's delayed til 25th for him.

But some good news. It seems Batman AC WILL NOT be a GFWL title! I'm sure that will make a lot of you who despise GFWL happy.

 

Chump? ...Really?

I said it makes me want to use it (as in the video turning viewers into nVidia zombies). I never said I will use it. Personally, I prefer ATI when given the option since they're generally much more affordable than their nVidia counterpart.

Example (Sager customization):
AMD Radeon HD6990M 2GB GDDR5 VRAM, DirectX 11 [+ $145.00]
nVidia GeForce GTX 580M 2GB GDDR5, DX11 [+ $475.00]

***So you're essentially paying $330 more for 5% better performance with the 580M, which is a rip off in my opinion***

The YT video put me in awe for the duration, then after some quick googling to compare, I realized it was nothing more than the 3D gaming-type gimmick they try to force on consumers. Throughout googling, I'm surprised at how many websites glorify nVidia PhysX for this game ...there's so many of them. They make it seems like if you have an ATI card, don't bother picking AC up, which is pretty hilarious.

 

It still says 18th here in the UK.

 

Wait AC wont be using GFWL?!!?!?!?!?!!??!

OMG OMG OMG

 

Yeah I haven't read a direct quote straight from the horse's mouth yet. But gaming blogs claim that Warner Bros (Publisher) confirmed that it won't be a GFWL title.

 

Arkham City does have GFWL unfortunately. I play it with DX11 disabled (universal bad performance), settings High default, AA disabled and I get 60 fps with occasional drops to 45 fps. Game play for me is perfectly smooth 99% of the time and the game environment is simply huge.

There is so much to do from saving hostages, listening into conversations, hanging from helicopters to spy on people, picking fights or simply gliding, attacking hit and run. I love the game and this one will be installed for a very long time. The open world game play is beautiful and like Arkham Asylum you really feel like you are batman, the main difference is you are much more deadly. This is a must buy but of course, be aware of the non functioning and broken DX11 and crappy GFWL which many people had the usual problems with.

 

LaptopNut are you running your gpu overclocked?
I expect to have a better performance with my 2760qm and my daily oc of 700/1600.
Althought 60fps most of the times are ok, but I want at least fxaa or 2xAA.

 

Yeah, it seems Batman: Arkham City's Dx11 features might be a rushed hackjob for PC.
Source

Either play on Dx9 or wait for a patch.
Might also work if you disable tesselation in the AMD Catalyst Control Center (Nvidia might have the same option) but this is just me thinking out loud.

 

Yeah wait for a patch for them to fix DX11. Reports are bad from all DX11 users.

The GFWL is disappointing.

 

No my GPU is at stock clocks. Why would anyone want or need AA at 1920 x 1080 native resolution?

I tested out FXAA and it had no effect on frame rates or how anything looked (in my opinion) but I am inside buildings at the moment and can't test outside just yet. The open world is what really tests the frames because it is so huge.

 

Anyone play this using 460m?

Looking to run this on 1080p and it if gets me an avg of 40 fps+ then I would def buy it

 

the 460M is at least 40 - 50% less powerful than the GTX 485M so with Physx disabled and other settings high or medium, you will be fine. I get a steady 60 fps with Physx disabled with no drops in frames from what I tested.

 

So performance is worse than the original Arkham Asylum? Can't say I'm surprised due to the scope of the game, guess I should have expected the open world to impact things more. Shame, as I could get the first game to run at a steady 60FPS, maxed out without Physx at 1920x1080.

Judging by comments here, with my 285m, I'll likely only be able to get 30FPS with no Physx at that res if I'm lucky. Still, that's playable for me, if not ideal.

 

Performance is a bit worse than Arkham Asylum but we now have quite a draw distance with a big open world to render as opposed to the more linear and closed of interiors and minimal outside areas of Arkham Asylum (as you know), the graphics also look better in my opinion.

Considering this, I think the performance hit is not that bad and the payoffs in gameplay are excellent. Most of the fights, are so far on a much bigger scale so you may have helicopters in the sky, huge detailed streets, 15+ bad guys and so much going on at the same time.

I don't know how much Securom, GFWL and any other copy protection is impacting performance but considering some games have taken a huge fps hit due to this, it wouldn't surprise me.

 

Damn, I forgot it had all that bulk strapped on top of it. Eurgh, DRM.

But yeah, considering how much they amped up the NPC count for fights, I was expecting a dramatic FPS hit. Glad to hear it's not too severe. From what I've seen in screens, the character models look remarkably superior to the AA versions and the environment also seems so much more dense. Can't wait to get my copy tomorrow, especially if it'll run almost as well as AA. Frankly, I can live with a 60FPS to 30FPS hit considering the scope of this game.

What are the Physx settings like? Can you enable individual effects or is it just on/off? I remember AA had low/high settings. Basically, I just want the interactive paper debris like in AA - that stuff is still so impressive and it ran fine on my rig. The volumetric fog always killed my FPS though, as cool as it was. Absolutely broke the Physx performance in Alice: Madness returns for me too. All other effects were fine, but my GPU hates volumetric fog. No way to disable the effects individually via the .ini either in that game which was a pain.

 

The Physx settings are the same as Arkham Asylum and I find normal to be the best compromise. I am also getting better performance for some reason or maybe I just didn't notice the higher fps rates last time round. My average frame rate is 70 fps and sometimes in the 90's. I did start a new game though but don't see how that could make a difference.

I had only played a few hours and restarted due to a lost save (hope it doesn't happen again) and I notice the game play is different due to different events. This is why I love open world sandbox!

Edit: I noticed that I had changed a setting but it should have resulted in less performance, I enabled FXAA (High) to do some testing earlier and forgot to disable it again.

My lost save has also reappeared. It is obvious that none of this nonsense would have happened if not for the plague that is GFWL

 

Ugh, took me 30 minutes to update GFWL before playing. Also, does the game take a minute to launch from the .exe for you? It does for me and no other game I own does that.

And now the game is constantly switching between the Gamepad and KB/M. It's unplayable. No idea what's going on... And it's not just the button prompts that change, the game will click for me and skip cutscenes/fight while the camera goes crazy.

On the plus side, with everything maxed (Minus FXAA) at 1920x1080, I get an average FPS of 55 in the benchmark...

 

Just got it, Origin has it for $24.99 but it needs like 17GB to install my poor SSD wont let me.

 

@ Vitor711

The game takes ages to start compared to Arkham Asylum and I expect it is all of the DRM rubbish. I have no idea about the controller issue though.

 

So it's SecurROM + GFWL ? Not to mention Origin or Steam? Man how many layers do they really need?

 

If you buy it on Steam, you have Securom, Steam / Steamworks and GFWL.

After games such as The Witcher 2 had an extra 20 fps performance in their DRM free version, I can't help but wonder how Arkham City would perform without that.

There is no way I would be waiting so long for the game to start if not for that and some people have been unable to play due to GFWL crashes, key codes not working etc. I already avoided titles due to 24/7 online DRM but even this is becoming stupid now.

 

GFWL is just awful. Unbelievably bad.

 

GFWL *IS* horrific. I don't understand the need for it at all.

 

I think GFWL is a good concept but the execution is flawed. D;
Its a good thing Microsoft is integrating it into Windows 8 so we dont need a ****load of third party apps + all the DRM they could cram inside just to launch a game.

 

Reinstalled it onto my other HDD and installed some new drivers for my touchpad - seems to be fixed now. I'm not the only one with this issue though judging by the official forums though.

Game runs great. 1920x1080 maxed out with no Physx or AA and it never dips below 35FPS. A constant 40/45 usually with 60 indoors. And boy did they improve their character models substantially. Game looks stunning.

But yeah, the minute long start up time is obscene.

 

GFWL sucks so bad. It needed an update, so I clicked ok. Then the game started, so I thought it was all set. Then I started a new game, and then it shut down and applied the update.

 

Batman: Arkham City PC performance issues linked to DX11, patch incoming

 

Newb question.. So should I buy this off of steam or origin?

Just recently started purchasing downloadable games online

 

I suppose you didn't play the original AA? If so grab the first one. There should be some good deal on it, so you might see if you gonna like it. I liked it very very much and gonna grab myself AC later, when the price will be right .

 

Thanks man,

Yeah I know it's cheap but I heard great things about the second one since it's an open world. That's something I loved about it. So I need to cop it asap