Batman: Arkham City Performance After The DX11 Patch

Batman: Arkham City Benchmark Results

Batman: Arkham City is a 2011 action-adventure video game developed by Rocksteady Studios. It is the sequel to the 2009 video game Batman: Arkham Asylum, based on the DC Comics superhero Batman. The game was released by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows. The PC and Onlive version was released on November 22, 2011.

Batman: Arkham City uses the Unreal Engine 3 game engine with PhysX. For bencmark testing of Batman: Arkham City we disabled PhysX to keep it fair and ran the game in DirectX 11 mode with 8x MSAA enabled and all the image quality features cranked up. You can see all of the exact settings in the screen captures above.

Before The December 7th Patch:

After The December 7th Patch:

Benchmark Results: As you can see from the two charts the performance on both AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards greatly improved thanks to the patch that included DirectX 11 fixes. At a screen resolution of 1920×1080 the AMD Radeon HD 6950 performance improved by 24% and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 improved by 29%.

Final Thoughts and Conclusions:

The built-in benchmark and the game finally plays like it should have when it was released and no longer has the stutters and random crashes like we experienced before the patch. When a patch fixes the crashes and boosts the performance by 20+ percent it goes to show something was really wrong! We also like how the new patch made it to where you have to hit the Esc key to end the benchmark, so you have time to record the score!

If you have the game be sure to give DirectX 11 a shot again unless you are on a 32-bit operating system. As DirectX 11 is still off-limits for 32-bit versions of Vista and Windows 7 until another patch comes out in the days or weeks ahead. Hopefully the next patch will fix the NVIDIA 3D Vision and 3D Surround issues that we ran into as well as this game title does look awesome in 3D.