3D Vision with Batman: Arkham Asylum

The PC version of Batman: Arkham Asylum takes you on a wild ride through the infamous prison it’s named for. It was also branded “3D Vision Ready,” even though it doesn’t meet quite the same standard of compatibility as RE5. The primary issue is that all of the cinematics are pre-rendered and so are only two-dimensional. It would be possible to have 3D versions of them shown when the stereoscopic 3D option is enabled, but that’d be a lot less practical than simply rendering them in real-time as they should’ve been. Other minor glitches include some 2D reflections and the occasional redundant depth-of-field effect.

Concerning unique out-of-screen elements, Batman has brought along his fair share. The most common involves the swarm of bats that appears to spring out of defeated enemies or from various UI elements. They tend to fly toward the camera and, when 3D is turned on, straight for your face! Otherwise, I’ve seen the zip-line and cape “pop out,” as well as several particle effects like sparks and smoke.

Like RE5, Batman: AA includes an in-game benchmarking tool that is compatible with 3D Vision effects. While there is an option in BmEngine.ini to enable DirectX 10, it’s just a remnant of the Unreal Engine 3 and doesn’t actually do anything. So, there is only the default mode of graphics, DX9. The tests were run with Very High settings (including High PhysX) at 1680x1050, again with Motion Blur disabled.

3D Vision Performance with Batman Arkham Asylum
GeForce GTX 275 GPU w/Core 2 Extreme X6800 @1680x1050 Screen Res
	0xAA	8xAA	16xAA
3D Vision Enabled	31 fps	27 fps	N/A
3D Vision Disabled	46 fps	42 fps	35 fps

Stereoscopic 3D in Batman: Arkham Asylum comes at the cost of about 33% of the framerate. It still ran mostly smooth throughout the game, though, barring a few extra large open areas. I threw in the AA tests to round out the chart, and to give you an idea of the performance hit you could expect. I wouldn’t recommend playing with that much anti-aliasing and 3D Vision on a rig of the same caliber I use – you’ll be sure to experience FPS in the low teens or possibly even single digits in some areas. At 16x, I didn’t have the patience to let the benchmark finish its slide show…