Nvidia has released a small PhysX patch for Batman: Arkham Asylum title. Description says:

In order to experience Batman: Arkham Asylum to its fullest extent when running PhysX on GeForce GTX 480 and 470 GPUs, users will need to replace the existing RRB.DLL file with a new one. In most configurations, the RRB.DLL can be found in the “\Square Enix\Batman Arkham Asylum GOTY\Binaries” directory.

If it is not located in this directory, please do a search for the filename on your system.

RRB.DLL is responsible for GPU accelerated Rigid Bodies calculations – large-scale physics effect, mostly memorable from Scarecrow nightmares.

You can download PhysX Rigid Bodies patch from here (2.8 mb)

Pretty interesting video emerges on YouTube today. Batman: Arkham Asylum built-in benchmark was used to demostrate that Crossfire setup (2x HD5870) is actually working along with Nvidia GPU (9800GT), dedicated for PhysX calculations (author was using GenL PhysX mod, I guess).

However, with PhysX effects set to High, fps is bottlenecked with PhysX simulation, as it went from average 301 (with PhysX disabled), to average 125. Still, more than enough to play the game without any inconvenience.

Year ago AMD’s opinion on PhysX was clear enough – it will die, if it remains a closed and proprietary standard.

Recently Bit-tech.net has published massive interview with Richard Huddy, AMD’s Worldwide Developer Relations manager, on game development,  competition’s progress, DX11 and other technologies. Of course, few words were said about PhysX – let’s focus on that and see what has changed for the past year.

About Batman Arkham Asylum (Link)

[Nvidia] put PhsyX in there, and that’s the one I’ve got a reasonable amount of respect for. Even though I don’t think PhysX – a proprietary standard – is the right way to go, despite Nvidia touting it as an “open standard” and how it would be “more than happy to license it to AMD“, but [Nvidia] won’t. It’s just not true! You know the way it is, it’s simply something [Nvidia] would not do and they can publically say that as often as it likes and know that it won’t, because we’ve actually had quiet conversations with them and they’ve made it abundantly clear that we can go whistle.

However, PhysX is a piece of technology that changes the gameplay experience and maybe it improves it. What I understand is that they actually invested quite a lot, Nvidia put in a hefty engineering time and they tried to make a difference to the game. So, in that aspect, I have respect for it; it’s a reasonable way to handle the situation given the investment in PhysX. Nvidia wanted a co-marketing deal and put forward PhysX, and Rocksteady and Eidos said, OK, as long as you do it – which they did.

Our commentary: It’s now hard to call PhysX irrelevant, when you have played Batman, isn’t it ? Another interesting part is different look on that ATI-NV PhysX licensing situation.

About ATI+NV PhysX setups ban (Link) | Nvidia’s position

They don’t want to QA it. The PC is an open platform, though – you’re meant to take any two parts and put them together. Intel don’t say “we’re not prepared to QA our CPUs with Nvidia or AMD’s graphics parts” when they obviously spend time QAing them because you want to build a system that works.

Our commentary: Yes, it’s looking, let’s say, not right for us too. That’s why we are doing our best to support PhysX Hybrids idea.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sequel to much-talked-of Batman: Arkham Asylum title was announced yersterday on Spike’s Video Game Award Show. No additional details were revealed except short trailer and teaser website – http://www.arkhamhasmoved.com/

Original Batman: Arkham Asylum is one of the best titles in GPU PhysX games library, lets hope Nvidia won’t loose opportunity to enhance Batman’s sequel with even greather hardware accelerated PhysX content.

It seems that today Hybrid ATI+NV PhysX systems (ATI GPU for graphics, Nvidia GPU for PhysX) are even more popular than Ageia PPUs in their time. Not officially supported (and chased) by Nvidia, such configurations are possible using custom patch.

This time, our colleagues from PCgamesHardware.de have published results of Hybrid PhysX tests in Batman: Arkham Asylum built-in benchmark.

To built a Hybrid PhysX System, you’ll need mobo with two PCI-E slots (regardless to SLI/Crossife support; PCI-Ex8/x4 is enough for PhysX), appropriate Nvidia GPU (something like 9600/GT240), Win XP/Win 7 OS and PhysX mod 1.02, which you can download here.

Installation instructions – Link#1 | Link#2 | Link#3 (Please note that most of them refer to old PhysX mod 1.01 – use 1.02 mod instead, download link above) | Link#4 | Link#5 (video guide) | Link#6 (Italian video guide) | Link#7 | Link#8 (detailed) <- it’s recommended to start from newer links.

InsideHW has published fine article about hardware PhysX acceleration, with some benchmarks included.  Games (Batman Arkham Asylum, Darkest of Days and Mirror’s Edge) overview part isn’t much detailed, and only three GPUs were tested (GTS250, GTX260, GTX285), but this article is good read if you want to get in touch with current GPU PhysX posture.

Batman Arkham Asylum

Darkest of Days

Mirror’s Edge

You can read rest of the article here

We’ve finally (better late than never) uploaded our PhysX comparison screenshots pack for Batman Arkham Asylum. Like screenshots for Darkest of Days title, these are triple-screens, covering differences between High, Normal and Off PhysX in-game settings.

While inequality between High and Off PhysX settings is obvious, High vs Normal difference is not so evident: comparing to High PhysX settings, there is less dynamic smoke and spider webs, ground fog is missing, some cloth banners are unavailable, only like 1/3 amount of leaves is present on Normal PhysX settings.

You can view all screens at Batman Arkham Asylum GPU PhysX info mini-site

or watch our PhysX comparison video

We are proud to present our new PhysX comparison video – for Batman Arkham Asylum retail PC version. Currently, this title has most impressive, advanced and complex hardware PhysX effects from all GPU PhysX games line.

Our Batman: Arkham Asylum PhysX mini-site is located here.

It’s disputable issue, is Batman Arkham Asylum that long-awaited killer-ap for hardware PhysX technology, but one is undoubtedly – supplementary PhysX effects are very well done, and can greatly increase overall game immersion level. Unfortunately,  heavy PhysX content requires appropriate Nvidia GPU, to help you understand which one – we’ve prepared an overview of PhysX benchmark articles, available on the web.

[17.09.09] Batman Arkham Asylum: PhysX or not PhysX by Revioo.com

Worth viewing article as it contains PhysX comparison videos, and benchmarks with variety of hardware (main – 9800GTX, GTX275, GTX280, dedicated – 8600GT, 9800GTX, GTX275)

[17.09.09] Batman Arkham Asylum Physx Preview by Chris Ray

This article is focused on multi-GPU (SLI, Tri-SLi, quad-SLI) configurations, and include some comparison PhysX screens too.

[21.09.09] Batman: Arkham Asylum – PhysX benchmarks with comparison shots and video by PCgameshardware.com

Contains comparison screenshots and video for in-game benchmark, and some perfomance testing for different PhysX settings as well.

[22.09.09] Batman Arkham Asylum — pořádná akce s PhysX by PCtuning

Massive and interesting overview – benchmarking results with decent amount of AMD and Nvidia GPUs, and even CPU influence tests.

[25.09.09] Batman nVidia PhysX Analysis by DriverHeaven

Probably, best article available currently. Decent descriptive part (videos included), and great benchmarking with various configurations (different CPU, varied PhysX GPU setups) tested.

[25.09.09] Optymalne karty graficzne do Batman: Arkham Asylum. PhysX, porównanie wersji PC, X360 i PS3 by benchmark.pl

Article with a small part related to GPU PhysX perfomance.

Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe some of you already heard about PhysX “trick”, that allows GPU PhysX effects in Batman Arkham Asylum to run with decent framerates (~30) on fast CPU ?

There is no magic or hack here, as in this metod MaxPhysicsSubsteps parameter value is reduced to 1 (instead of 5 by default), that result in faster simulation speed, but greather decreased calculations quality.

TheElMoIsEviL has uploaded video to YouTube, that shows how well this trick works:

In the second part of this video, you can notice how papers (simulated by cloth, actually) get stuck in Batman’s character model,  their vertexes are jumping and jittering all over the screen – that’s result of simulation quality trimming.

Use this solution or not – it’s up to you, but if you want to see complex PhysX effects at their best, I’ll need appropriate Nvidia GPU, without alternatives these days.