Batman Arkham Knight GPU test

BASIC GAME INFORMATION

   

Year of construction: 2015
Genre: Action-adventure
developer: Rocksteady
Publisher: Warner Bros. interactive entertainment

BATMAN™: Arkham Knight brings Rocksteady Studios' acclaimed Arkham trilogy to a close. The game was created specifically for next-gen platforms and features a unique version of the Batmobile. The appearance of this amazing machine has been awaited for a very long time. It is designed to organically complement the game mechanics and make the player truly feel like Batman - now he will be able to soar over the city and sweep through its streets with the wind. Which is very useful, because never before has Gotham been threatened with a danger of such magnitude - the shock finale of the series brings Batman together with the Scarecrow, who has returned to unite a gang of supervillains against him and finally deal with him.

THE GRAFICAL PART

This subsection of our review highlights the main graphical aspects of this game. Particular attention is paid to the version of the graphics engine used, the version of the API used, graphic settings and the quality of development of the main visual aspects.

Supported OS and graphics API

Batman Arkham Knight поддерживается основными операционными системами Windows, which includes Windows  Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Other operating systems are not currently supported by developers and will not be supported. 

 

The priority and main graphics API for Batman Arkham Knight is DX11.  

Game engine

Batman Arkham Knight is based on the Unreal Engine 3.5 game engine. UE3 was designed with personal computers using modern rendering systems (DirectX 9/11 and OpenGL 2/3) and current generation consoles in mind. Due to the widespread use of multiprocessor systems, the engine uses two parallel main threads - the main thread (responsible primarily for gameplay) and the rendering thread.

 

In addition to the two main threads, secondary threads can be called, which perform one-time tasks. There is now support for multi-threaded dynamic data loading (streaming), for example, loading a “location” directly while moving around it in order to save resources. The updated graphics engine supports most modern technologies, including HDR, per-pixel lighting, dynamic shadows, shader model 4, geometry shaders.

The graphics pipeline itself was transferred to the control of shaders. The Karma physical subsystem was abandoned in favor of another one called PhysX from NVIDIA. Later, NVIDIA released a set of additional libraries for the game, allowing you to use all the capabilities of the physical system (such as the “liquid” or fabric effect). The FaceFX mechanism is responsible for the animation of the characters' faces.

Updated EAX version to 5th. Added SpeedTree support for tree generation. The emphasis was placed on additive geometry, but support for subtractive geometry was not abandoned. The disadvantage of subtractive geometry is primarily the much longer lighting calculation. A new UnrealEd editor has been introduced, rewritten using wxWidgets. 

Advanced Game Settings

Oddly enough, there are incredibly few graphic settings in Batman Arkham Knight. Of the entire series of Batman games, this is the least we've seen...

 

Below we have provided screenshots of the game at various graphics settings, where our readers can see the difference between the minimum, medium and maximum graphics quality settings. 

Various quality modes

The difference between the settings is almost unnoticeable.

Comparison of FullHD and 4K

Batman Arkham Knight looks pretty good in 4K

Comparison of anti-aliasing modes

In-game anti-aliasing virtually eliminates all "surface unevenness".

General visual design and game physics

Batman Arkham Knight has a pretty good picture, but nothing more. Unreal Engine 3.5 is already quite old, and developers are still squeezing the last juice out of this engine, trying to raise graphics to a new level of quality every time. To some extent they succeed, but still, they wanted much better...

   

 

The game is optimized for GeForce GTX processors and supports a number of NVIDIA GameWorks technologies: NVIDIA Turbulence, PhysX Particles, PhysX Destruction, PhysX Clothing and more. Smoke and fog react to character movements during fight scenes, including when boxes are thrown or parts of the floor explode.

 Fences, railings and trees are destroyed when collided with the Batmobile. Sheets of paper fly apart as Batman gives the villains a beating. Raindrops interact realistically with Batman and his cape.

Next, we will move directly to gaming tests and determine what impact this game has on modern computer hardware.  

TEST PART

GPU test

All video cards were tested at maximum graphics quality using MSI Afterburner. The purpose of the test is to determine how video cards from different manufacturers behave under the same conditions. The average and minimum FPS were taken as performance indicators. Below is a video of the benchmark:    

Our video cards were tested at different screen sizes of 1920x1080, 2560x1600 and 3840x2160 at the maximum graphics quality settings allowed by Batman Arkham Knight, with and without PhysX effects enabled. Note that on AMD video cards and when physics is accelerated by the CPU, the PhysX settings are not available.

AMD CrossFireX is not currently supported by the game,  SLI has very low scalability. The game has an FPS limit of 30 frames, but this lock can be easily removed in the game config. During tests  PhysX for clarity, solutions based on the GTX 980 Ti were presented on NVIDIA video cards, where the physical accelerator was used GTX 980. The game has hardware-locked protection, so we had to use several copies of the game for the test.  2 GB solutions allow you to play only in a resolution of 1920x1080 with physics effects disabled; in other modes, due to lack of memory, the friezes are simply terrible...

Testing at resolution 1920x1080

  

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1200 PhysX off

  

With these settings acceptable FPS indicator was shown by video cards of the level Radeon R7 260X or GeForce GTX 750 Ti. The optimal solutions would be Radeon HD 7870 or GeForce GTX 760.

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1200 PhysX on 

 

With these settings, acceptable FPS was shown by video cards of the level GeForce GTX 780 and higher

Testing at 2560x1600 resolution

  

Testing at maximum quality settings 2560x1600 PhysX off

 

With these settings An acceptable FPS indicator was shown by video cards of the Radeon HD 7950 or GeForce GTX 780 level. The optimal solutions would be the Radeon R9 280X or GeForce GTX 780.

Testing at maximum quality settings 2560x1600 PhysX on

 

With these settings, video cards of the GeForce GTX 780 level showed an acceptable FPS. The optimal solution would be the GeForce GTX 980.

Testing at resolution 3840x2160

   

Testing at maximum quality settings 3840x2160 PhysX off

 

With these settings, video cards of the Radeon R9 290X or GeForce GTX 780 Ti level showed acceptable FPS. The optimal solutions will be GeForce GTX 980 and higher.

Testing at maximum quality settings 3840x2160 PhysX on

 

With these settings, video cards of the GeForce GTX 980 level showed an acceptable FPS. The optimal solutions will be  GeForce GTX 980 Ti and above.

Well, based on the tests, we can conclude that NVIDIA video cards look more attractive for the game. It is also worth noting that the game is quite raw and when activating physics effects and in the presence of a system with SLI, it is advisable to disable it, and direct the second video card to process physics. In ultra-high resolution, installing a separate video card to accelerate physics gives a positive effect when using SLI.

Testing of video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the program MSI Afterburner. The indicator was based on results on top video cards from AMD and NVIDIA with separate screen sizes 1920x1080 and 2560x1600 with different anti-aliasing settings.

Testing at maximum memory GPU quality settings

 

The video memory measurement indicator was taken at the end of the gaming benchmark. The recommended amount of video memory usage for a resolution of 1920x1200 will be 4096 MB of video memory, for a resolution of 2560x1600 - 6144 MB of video memory, and for a resolution of 3840x2160 about 6144 MB of video memory. 

CPU test

 

We tested processor dependence on 16 models of basic configurations that are relevant today. The test was carried out in those places where the video card value for the game is minimal and its load was less than 99%, this time at a resolution of 1920x1080 with maximum graphics quality settings. 

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080

 

CPU performance in the gaming benchmark is sufficient for all models.

Loading of processor coresat maximum quality settings 1920x1080 Intel% 

 

Loading of processor cores at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 AMD% 

 

Batman Arkham Knight is capable of supporting up to 8 computing threads, but barely uses only 4 computing cores...

RAM test

The test was carried out on the basic configuration of Core i 7 5960X@4.6 GHz with 16GB DDR4 2400 MGz pre-installed memory. The entire used operational memory was taken as an indicator. The RAM test on the entire system was carried out on various test benches without launching third-party applications (browsers, etc.).

Testing the game's RAM consumption at various quality settings 

 

As we can see, with various quality settings, the amount of RAM consumed in Batman Arkham Knight is at the level of 4000 megabytes.

Testing system RAM consumption  

 

On a 6GB system, Batman Arkham Knight consumes about 5.6GB of RAM. In the presence of a system with 8 gigabytes, the RAM consumption of all RAM was 6.2 gigabytes. With a 16 GB system, the total memory consumption was almost 7.2 gigabytes. And with 32 gigabytes of RAM, the system consumes 8.2 gigabytes of RAM.  

It may seem that the test results look terrible, but in the game itself, FPS drops can be significantly lower than in the in-game benchmark, so we are patiently waiting for fixes and improvements from the developers...

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