Batman: Arkham Asylum Enables AA Only on NVIDIA Hardware on PCs

[Der FüHRER]

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here's an article 'defending' nvidia..hehe. flame on ;p

Fudzilla - Battle over Batman: Arkham Asylum AA

Who did what?

During recent days, you could see a fierce battle between AMD and Nvidia PR teams over Batman: Arkham Asylum and the fact that PhysX and AA works only when you run it on Nvidia GPUs, while on AMD cards the game worked, but without the in-game AA.

Nvidia's team worked with developers and designed the AA engine by themselves. That's a clear fact, and thus the game does indeed look better when paired up with an Nvidia GPU. On the other hand, AMD's PR team is adamant that Nvidia had a lot to do with the fact that the game simply doesn't like AMD GPUs. According to a statement made by AMD's Ian McNaughton, AMD did provide the developer with a solution, but it didn't make its way into the final release of the game.

According to the guys over at PCPer and their sources at Eidos, AMD was offered to send engineers to the studio and do the same work that Nvidia did, but AMD declined. The fact that Nvidia's TWIMTBP team did a better job than AMD's developer relations team is obvious, and it has been like that for a long time. On the other hand AMD's hands aren't exactly clean in this story as some titles that were previously released and will be released in the future, will work better on AMD hardware, especially due to the close relationship between AMD and the developers of those titles.

The bottom line is that this isn't something new and the same situation happened on multiple occasions. The Half-Life 2 was ATI game, Assassins Creed was Nvidia's, HAWX worked better on ATI GPUs, Battleforge was faster on ATI. DIRT 2 will possibly be faster on ATI, and bunch of other titles work faster, or look better on one or the other GPU.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is just a drop in the sea of such titles, but it looks like that the fact that Batman is a decent selling PC game changed the way how things are, and suddenly it became a problem. We've tried the Batman game on an HD 4850 and the game worked flawlessly and looked pretty good even without in-game AA. We will certainly try it on Nvidia hardware as well and we are quite sure that it will look better.

We must give credit to Nvidia for sending a team of people that has designed the AA engine in order to make the game better. The game works on ATI hardware as well, and AMD can still design the AA engine and convince Eidos to make a patch for those users that have ATI hardware.

We are quite sure that ATI will turn its attention to DX 11 titles like Stalker and Dirt 2, which will probably work faster on ATI GPUs, while Nvidia will turn its attention to Assassins Creed 2 which will come next year and the situation will again be the same.

[centax error]

murag di ni maayo padayonon ni ilang marketing strategy dah...unsaon na lang if moabot and adlaw na certains games will be exclusive to run on ATI or NVDIA cards only...maahat ta ug palit new video card kun ang atong games na ganahan di modagan sa atoang existing card

[poldopunk]

well, there's a huge discussion regarding this if you listen to both sides, the game uses the UR3 engine which doesn't have native support for AA. developers of the game really had no plans on including AA and they say Nvidia funded them to develop AA feature for this game. when you say develop, that includes the resources, QA and what nots and in my opinion (not that it matters), ok raman nga gi exclusive sa nvidia ang AA to their cards because they made an investment sa game to enhance the experience of their customers. if you can recall, ATI has the same program as TWIMTBP a while back...

think of it this way, if i am a business man and i invested in a certain group of people to improve the product para maka benefit akoang mga costumers, do you think i'd allow the competitor to hitch a ride without paying for anything? nvidia is in a tight spot right now, there are leakages and analysis of their economic standpoint through semiaccurate.com, so they're basically positioning themselves where they earn the most. naa gani article ngadto about criticisms on a fake fermi card on their paper launch but i digress.

**edit**

but then again the main argument from ATI's side was that AA works with ATI cards during the demo but it didn't make it through the final release...the other camp would say, the demo isn't the entire game, there were issues later but us consumers...we'll never know

[eirawn]

Btaw. They are talking about "intellectual property" and "cost". NVIDIA is correct to disable those function as freebies to competitors.

[fineupgrades]

Nvidia dismisses AMD's Batman accusations

Late last week, AMD publicly blasted Nvidia and a number of game developers because of some issues in a few recent games that have shipped as part of Nvidia's The Way It's Meant To Be Played program.

Ian McNaughton, a senior manager in Advanced Marketing at AMD, claimed that Nvidia blocked AMD from working on Batman: Arkham Asylum, Need For Speed: Shift and Resident Evil 5, claiming that they are "proprietary TWIMTBP titles". Ouch.

McNaughton complained that Batman: Arkham Asylum has an anti-aliasing mode on Nvidia hardware, which disappears when an ATI Radeon is recognised as the primary GPU in the system. The game also implements Nvidia's PhysX technology, too.

However, he neglected to mention that Batman: AA is based on Unreal Engine 3, which uses a deferred renderer on DirectX 9.0. Deferred renders don't support MSAA in DirectX 9.0 without a driver workaround, which is exactly what Nvidia's DevTech team helped to implement (and test). Because of the tight development schedule though, this couldn't be tested on ATI's Radeon graphics cards.

Ashu Rege, director of Nvidia's DevTech team, said that "you have no idea how tight the schedule was on Batman." He explained that there was less than a week to fix several critical bugs in the physics effects before the game went off for GfW approval because the Nvidia engineer working with developer Rock Steady on the PhysX implementation was just about to go on holiday when the bugs came to light.

Rege said "we had absolutely no time to go 'oh yeah, how can we screw ATI by the way?' Seriously, nobody ever has time to think about those kinds of things. In this situation, had we enabled something that was not tested on ATI GPUs [and broke the game as a result], there were a number of things that could have happened. The worst thing from my perspective is that the developers won't want our help in the future because we broke their game."

Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of Content and Technology at Nvidia, chimed in and said; "Even if we wished we could, we can't possibly expect to really support ATI's drivers. What if ATI changes the way its drivers apply AA and that breaks Rock Steady's game - whose fault is that?"

Tamasi later went onto say that "no game developer on the planet is going to let us do anything to a game which prevents it from running on ATI, or having a good experience. Whenever we go to do something, the first principle we apply is 'do no harm' - you never make it worse than before you went in. Ever."

"If we did that, next time, the developer is going to say 'sorry, we don't want to work with you guys' and that's the end of our existence," added Rege.

[centax error]

i/m not buying the logic behind this and to me this is moving backward and not a good for the gaming hardware/gaming sector. what if nvdia is really financially distressed (like who isn't nowadays?) then intel comes to the rescue and bought them. soon enough you'll hear a kid whinning that his favorite gaming is not running smooth with his amd/ati rig while his neighbors intel/nvidia set up the game runs smooth as silk. then nvdia/intel tells this kid - "sorry kid, it's a proprietary product you know? and that we have spent a lot of money for R&D including bribes to the game developers BUT if you really want your favorite games to run smooth why not buy our product? " now this is BS! and it's walking a very thin line between fair business practice and anti trust law. Although game exclusivity is nothing new but I hate to see game developers end up like whores being used by bigger companies. why not they focus more on making games more fun and less on trying to tease companies into offering whose got the biggest bid. well, money is good but too much of it is greed and it's not good for the health

[weezur]

there's always a DIY hack around for things like this. besides, kinhanlan man japun nvidia card to run physX ani diba?

[andz]

i/m not buying the logic behind this and to me this is moving backward and not a good for the gaming hardware/gaming sector. what if nvdia is really financially distressed (like who isn't nowadays?) then intel comes to the rescue and bought them. soon enough you'll hear a kid whinning that his favorite gaming is not running smooth with his amd/ati rig while his neighbors intel/nvidia set up the game runs smooth as silk. then nvdia/intel tells this kid - "sorry kid, it's a proprietary product you know? and that we have spent a lot of money for R&D including bribes to the game developers BUT if you really want your favorite games to run smooth why not buy our product? " now this is BS! and it's walking a very thin line between fair business practice and anti trust law. Although game exclusivity is nothing new but I hate to see game developers end up like whores being used by bigger companies. why not they focus more on making games more fun and less on trying to tease companies into offering whose got the biggest bid. well, money is good but too much of it is greed and it's not good for the health

Couldn't have said it any better!

Yes, but its sad you need to buy "this" video card, so you can run "this" game properly. In marketing stand point its a great idea, and saves the company! but in gaming industry it doesn't help. it's like back peddling, it's like "buy my brand so you can run this game better"


Nvidia may have batman, but ATi has the batmobile.

[jayredd]

Share lang pud ko aning video sa batman arkham asylum.... from megotrice

CLICK HERE

[cute_6423]

Couldn't have said it any better!

Yes, but its sad you need to buy "this" video card, so you can run "this" game properly. In marketing stand point its a great idea, and saves the company! but in gaming industry it doesn't help. it's like back peddling, it's like "buy my brand so you can run this game better"


Nvidia may have batman, but ATi has the batmobile.

lol..love this
nvidia's desperate for profit now...