Batman: Arkham City Graphics & Performance Guide

December 17th, 2011

By Andrew Burnes

The PC version is available, and in this article we’ll examine the included enhancements, run benchmarks on the game using our 500-Series GPUs, recommend Optimal Playable Settings, and show how to enhance your frame rates by repurposing older NVIDIA video cards that may be gathering dust on a shelf somewhere.

Graphics Options

 Batman: Arkham City allows you to enable and disable numerous graphical effects, so whether you’re looking to increase your frame rate, or simply to eliminate motion blur, you control how the game looks.




The Batman: Arkham City configuration panel where every in-game effect can be enabled and disabled.

General Graphics Options

In addition to the configurable PhysX, DirectX 11, 3D Vision and anti-aliasing options, a number of other settings can be enabled and disabled. Here’s a quick rundown of what you gain and lose when adjusting the ‘Detail Level’ preset:

Quality Preset	Very High	High	Medium	Low
Texture Quality	High	Medium	Medium	Low
Dynamic Lights	Enabled	Enabled	Enabled	Enabled
Dynamic Shadows	Enabled	Enabled	Enabled	Disabled
Motion Blur	Enabled	Enabled	Disabled	Disabled
Distortion	Enabled	Enabled	Disabled	Disabled
Lens Flares	Enabled	Enabled	Disabled	Disabled
Light Shafts	Enabled	Enabled	Disabled	Disabled
Reflections	Enabled	Enabled	Disabled	Disabled
Ambient Occlusion	Enabled	Disabled	Disabled	Disabled
Max Shadow Resolution	512	512	512	256

• Dynamic Shadows: Shadows that change based on the movement of characters and the lighting around them. Disabling this effect should be a last resort in search of performance.
• Motion Blur: Helps accentuate exciting and fast-paced elements of the game and adds to the overall spectacle. Some users may prefer to disable it simply because they favor a ‘clean’ experience.
• Distortion: Creates effects such as heat haze, as can be seen in real life.
• Lens Flares: Responsible for the stylistic use of halos when looking at bright lights and the sun.
• Light Shafts: Used to simulate bright light shining down into a dark room or area through a crack or gap.
• Reflections: isn’t required, even for The Joker’s brain-dead goons!
• Ambient Occlusion: A basic DirectX 9 and 10 version of the DirectX 11 HBAO ambient occlusion feature, this setting renders soft shadows created by reflected light sources.
• Dynamic Lights: A hidden setting, Rocksteady leaves this enabled even on Low. Disabling it manually had no perceivable impact on frame rates, but did make the visuals reminiscent of last-gen games.
• Max Shadow Resolution: Another hidden setting that determines the quality of all shadows in Arkham City. Can be manually raised to 2048 on high-end GPUs to sharpen shadows.
• Texture Quality: Linked to the ‘Detail Level’ option, this hidden setting adjusts the quality of textures in the game. By manually disabling the options visible in the configuration panel, one can leave ‘Detail Level’ on Very High to benefit from improved textures without the performance hit of the visual effects.

 

DirectX 11 Tessellation

Just about everything in the game is drawn using triangles. Tessellation is a technique that divides large triangles into many smaller triangles, and when used with displacement mapping, significantly improves the geometric detail of objects. Tessellation has many uses depending on the game . In Battlefield 3, for example, it improves the detail of mountains and terrain. In Batman: Arkham City, tessellation is used to add extra definition to organic, curved and bendy objects, such as trees and power cables.





As you can see in the example above from Poison Ivy’s lair, there is a significant fidelity improvement between Tessellation Off and Normal on the deformed tree, and a further improvement going from Normal to High.

To achieve this effect an artist examined the tree, deciding where extra detail would help enhance the scene, and then created a texture containing the bumps and their physical heights, as seen when tessellation is enabled. This texture, known as a displacement map, is loaded into the game and the extra detail created on top of the basic tree using the graphics card’s DirectX 11 features.




Click for an animated comparison highlighting the three levels of tessellation.



As mentioned, GPU-powered tessellation is also utilized on cables, pipes and trees untouched by Ivy’s poison. The common trait between these three examples is curvature, something that is ordinarily too ‘expensive’ to produce using standard polygons.

In this enhanced PC release, Arkham City also makes use of a second tessellation technique called Mesh Smoothing to add tessellated triangles to break up harsh angular outlines, adding curvature where previously the object was comprised of many straight surfaces in an attempt to create the appearance of curvature. It’s a subtle addition, but once you know it’s there and you’ve seen the improvement you won’t want to go back.

Hardware Accelerated PhysX Effects

In a dilapidated environment like the eponymous Arkham City you expect to see debris, be that discarded rubbish, tattered materials, or loose masonry fallen from a crumbling building. And though other games have presented this level of detail in cityscapes in the past, most render these objects as static items baked into the scenery’s textures, and as immovable items fixed in place by the world’s strongest superglue.

Enabling ‘Hardware Accelerated PhysX’ in the game’s launcher adds these details, all of which are rendered as physical objects, able to be manipulated realistically in real-time. Newspapers tumble along the streets in concert with the wind, bunting flutters, and ropes dangle. Each can be further manipulated by the actions of Batman, his enemies, and his numerous gadgets. And being physics-led objects they don’t clip through the terrain or other objects, so given the correct circumstances said newspapers may end up wrapped around a street lamp by the driving wind or in a corner with leaves and other simulated objects. This realistic collision detection is the most intensive element of PhysX, requiring the power of the graphics card’s CUDA cores to determine the outcome of thousands of calculations per second to ensure that the a piece of paper doesn’t ‘clip’ through a character, wrecking the immersion of the scene and effect.by Geforce.com