Yo jurors! If you’ve followed the Batman: Arkham series on PC then you probably know that each game has featured the addition of Nvidia’s proprietary graphical bells and whistles for people using Nvidia GPU’s. These features have primarily been hardware accelerated PhysX for interactive smoke, fog, paper, cloth and debris along with some mild environment destruction along with the option to use Nvidia’s temporal anti-aliasing.

Well Arkham Knight will be no different. B:AK is set to include Nvidia’s GameWorks suite of features and going by the trailer they’ve released it’ll include a good amount of hardware assisted PhysX effects again. It looks great...but there are a few catches.

For starters, these effects are Nvidia only. So if you’re an AMD user you’re out of luck unless you have a secondary Nvidia card and can get one of a few hacks circulating the internet to work for you. The other catch is that these effects incur a noticeable performance cost. Let me break this down in detail so you know what you’re getting into.

On my rig at 1080p my 780 Ti can handle both rendering the previous Arkham games with maxed settings and running the PhysX simulations. This is because the game itself, at this resolution, only taxes my card to 60% at most without PhysX. Turning PhysX on will see the card operating in the 80% range with spikes up to 99% usage. Cranking the game up to 4K resolution taxes the card to 99% by itself so there’s no headroom for Physx. Using a secondary GPU to offload PhysX gives me a 16% boost to performance. So just keep this mind if you see this trailer and want these visual effects. If Arkham Knight has similar performance penalties to the previous three games you’ll likely need either a powerful single card that can handle it all or you’ll need one card to handle the game and another to handle the PhysX.

Here are some trailers of the past games to see more of the kinds of effects that will likely be in Arkham Knight on computers that can handle GameWorks: 

Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman: Arkham City, Batman: Arkham Origins

What say you jurors? Is your PC ready for the full graphical experience that Arkham Knight plans to bring? Or are you unimpressed by these visuals and wondering why so serious? Let us know in the comments.

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