Port Report: Batman: Arkham Origins

Really good article. I love the AA closeups, which show something I've noticed on recent games- FXAA has gotten really good. If you are on AMD, you can force it using RadeonPro, and on High/Ultra it is superior to in-game FXAA in Borderlands 2, or regular AA in some games like Dishonored (based on my old card, an HD6870), though there is a bit of a performance hit on Ultra. Imo RadeonPro is a must for AMD users... I'm seriously missing it, there is nothing as user-friendly for Nvidia unfortunately.

 

I am running with a GTX760 4GB and Phenom II x6 3.2ghz right now.  Nvidia's TXAA is very nice... definitely felt it was superior to the other AA methods. However, the performance drop is significant, as it combines temporal AA with some regular MSAA. So I'm just using FXAA for now. I'll try to take a few comparison shots later to compare.

 

I also found enhanced DX11 depth of field - which has really cool bokeh lense flare effects - gave major performance hits. It looks so good in some places I am tolerating it, though.

 

I have run into no game break bugs whatsoever at this point, no graphical bugs or texture pop-in, and no crashes, but I'm not too far into the game (just past the Deathstroke fight). I am wondering if the game is more stable on Nvidia hardware since they worked with them on it (we saw something similar with Tomb Raider, where the developer's work with AMD left the game poorly tested and optimized for Nvidia cards).

 

Good report.

 

*edit*

 

Here is a .zip of screenshots taken at 1080p comparing FXAA Ultra to TXAA High. I left the FRAPS fps on them, the fps hit varies but TXAA is always less (FXAA is on left or top in all shots). And I included some closeups to make it easier to compare. They are in .bmp format, the differences are so small I didn't want compression screwing them up.

 

Overall impressions:

 

TXAA High is definitely superior, though it's hard to say it's worth the framerate hit. It's most noticeable in the usual places like distant details. It seems more precise than FXAA; FXAA seems to "fill in" to de-jaggie, resulting in lines and surfaces that are sometimes "bulging" slightly. TXAA maintains the proper dimensions of objects while keeping an almost flawless AA across the surface itself.

 

The "T" is for "temporal", so I'm not sure screenshots give a full impression of how it "feels" to play with it on. Things just feel... I don't know, smoother? It almost feels like you are playing at a higher resolution if that makes any sense. So overall I'd say it's a pretty good job on Nvidia's part.

 

FXAA (left) vs TXAA (right)

It's really disappointing how poor parts of this port are, considering how much work they've done on the previous games over the last few months, moving them to Steamworks.

Well, the developing went from Rocksteady Studios to WB Montréal (a pretty new team) and the MP was handled by Splash Damage (who are familiar with MP games but not that great). I think that's why they didn't want to give PC review copies.

 

But I'd like to add something to the technical part of the review : I'm using an AZERTY keyboard on Arkham City GOTY and while you can rebind your keys just fine, navigating certain type of maps is rather hard with the keyboard since it's not gonna automatically rebind to ZQSD (it keeps the WASD scheme). I had to rebind them manually through the bminput.ini file. And that is definitely not user friendly.

I hope they won't pull out the same crap with that again.

 

But I don't think it's worth getting right away. Maybe on a steam sale when the GOTY is out.

@Kiopho:

You can bind your keys in-game in Origins, and you can bind actions to two different keys (which I really like). Pic Here. I don't remember having to do anything weird in Arkham City to bind my keys, it's handled through the launcher (BmLauncher.exe). Pick "settings", then the "controls" tab on the top right and you are good to go:

 

Did you just miss that you could do that? I don't understand why you would need to dig into the config file just to change the basics like WASD.

 

One issue with Origins is that it doesn't recognize Mouse 4 and 5, which the other games did; had to create a profile in my Logitech software to make them emulate the appropriate keypresses. You also need to tweak the config file to alter the sensitivity, though again I just did that via my mouse software.