Batman: Arkham Asylum has been hyped as of the most exciting games of this year and as a game developed under NVIDIA’s The Way it’s Meant to be Played flag and has been used frequently in PR stunts. Especially to show the advanced physical effects made possible through NVIDIA’s PhysX technology. It seems there is more than just optimizations by NVIDIA in the game, it has even removed certain features for those using AMD Radeon graphics cards.
For some reason the graphics engine deactivates antialiasing when it recognizes a Radeon graphics card installed. Even if you activate antialiasing in the drivers this will reduce performance significantly.
The hardware has no problem with using the antialiasing available in the graphics engine, which AMD proved by editing the device ID of a Radeon card and running the game, whereafter the antialiasing settings were once again available.
That NVIDIA convinces game developers to use these kinds of methods to undermine the competition is just sad. Alas, we are not surprised after learning that it recently added a bit of code that deactivates PhysX support when a Radeon graphics is installed.
A reply from the NVIDIA Developer Relations was posted at XtremeSystems:
A representative of AMD recently claimed that NVIDIA interfered with anti-aliasing (AA) support for Batman: Arkham Asylum on AMD cards. They also claimed that NVIDIA’s The Way It’s Meant to be Played Program prevents AMD from working with developers for those games.
Both of these claims are NOT true. Batman is based on Unreal Engine 3, which does not natively support anti-aliasing. We worked closely with Eidos to add AA and QA the feature on GeForce. Nothing prevented AMD from doing the same thing.
Games in The Way It’s Meant to be Played are not exclusive to NVIDIA. AMD can also contact developers and work with them.
We are proud of the work we do in The Way It’s Meant to be Played. We work hard to deliver kickass, game-changing features in PC games like PhysX, AA, and 3D Vision for games like Batman. If AMD wants to deliver innovation for PC games then we encourage them to roll up their sleeves and do the same.
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