In part one of my Batman: Arkham Asylum coverage, I gave an intro to the game and talked about some installation issues on 64-bit systems. I'm happy to report that once I got that seemingly simple issue out of the way, the game has played nearly flawlessly. On my system, which has an 8800GT for graphics and a 9600GT for PhysX, framerates were acceptable most of the time with all settings maxed out, at 1080P. I use v-sync to reduce tearing, and the counter stayed around 30 fps most of the game.

The Unreal engine provides some amazingly-realistic images, and the developers really took their time creating the textures for the characters. Even on the consoles at 720P, the game looks amazing. However, at 1080P with 4x AA, the visuals are even more stunning. Joker's hair is one of my favorite things to stare at, as the sheer volume of polygons is impressive. Batman also looks very detailed, especially the Armor Suit that you can play the Challenge Maps with.

Speaking of Batman's suit, his cape's movements are quite fluid thanks to the PhysX SDK. You'll notice, on the PC, that banners and other hanging cloth resembles the cape's movement, and for good reason. Even when PhysX is turned off, the cape is still rendered with it by the CPU. Turning up the PhysX setting just adds more cloth, cobwebs, paper, leaves and other objects to interact with.

The places that brought my system to it's knees every time were the Scarecrow scenes. There are a few times that Batman is infected with the fear toxin that Scarecrow created, and Batman is suddenly in a huge spiraling vortex with a huge Scarecrow in the middle. With PhysX on, these scenes take a drastic turn, with chunks of masonry flying around and papers being lifted up into the abyss. If you remember the tornado level in Unreal Tournament 3, you've got a pretty good idea of what this looks like. With all of the PhysX stuff going on, the framerate dropped to 15fps, but just long enough to get some of the chunks off the screen.

Besides the particle physics, the cobwebs are my favorite addition to the PC version. Batman spends a lot of time in the air vents in Arkham Asylum, and crawling through the cobwebs really seem to help with the experience. Another place that PhysX is really needed is when bad guys are digging through piles of papers. On the consoles, they are moving their arms, but the paper's not moving. With PhysX, they are actually moving papers around. Much cooler.

Well, I'm going to get together some video and some screenshots for Part III which should be up in the next day or two. Then we'll be looking closer at performance numbers, and what you can expect framerate wise.