Classic FPS Remastered: Batman Arkham City (Patreon)

Well, this one was particularly significant back in the day - Arkham City was a huge game. It was so important in fact, that Nintendo showcased a port of it at E3 2012 for Wii U! Yes, for Classic FPS Remastered this week, we go back to archive captures from June 28th, 2011 - just a few days after their decade anniversary! 

On the face of it, Arkham City doesn't really tell us anything new in 2021: it's Unreal Engine 3, it struggled just a touch on PlayStation 3 compared to Xbox 360, but it is clearly an improvement over the PS3 port of Arkham Asylum, where Sony's console fell short on elements like ambient occlusion, anti-aliasing (there wasn't any) and even texture quality. Visually at least, Arkham City on PS3 and Xbox 360 was on par - and in fact, neither version of the sequel had any visible anti-aliasing at all, though more of the more modern UE3 features did their way into the mix on both machines.

Performance? It's interesting to look back at this one with the understanding we have today. Both are double-buffered - one frame is displayed while the next is rendered - but both versions use different forms of adaptive v-sync. Both will have v-sync active at the target 30fps, both will tear beneath. The difference is that PS3 exhibits full-screen tearing, while Xbox 360 limits it to the top of the screen and only relatively rarely. 

As for why tearing is limited to the top of the screen? Well, a 30fps game has 33.3ms of render time per frame. But what if the frame completes in, say, 34ms? Should you wait another 16.7ms for the next screen refresh and effectively stall the GPU, or should you just update the frame now and put up with a little tearing right at the top of the display? The latter approach lowers latency and is used commonly in games today.

We can assume that Rocksteady was happy enough with the Xbox 360 version to effectively to keep v-sync active (with this extra 'wiggle room') but allowed for full-screen tearing on PS3 to increase frame-rate and lower latency, at the expensive of image consistency.

The best way to play today? This is a tricky one. Tragically, there does not seem to be backwards compatibility for this one. We're lumbered with the Virtuos remakes for Xbox One and PS4, with their ridiculous frame-rate caps and 'love it, hate it' remastered artwork. This leaves you with Rocksteady's PC version, which ran pretty well (in DX9 mode at least) on the hardware of the day and should fly now - it's just a shame that any pre-rendered movies would still be at low bitrate 720p...

Fascinating fact: Arkham City used TriOviz reprojected stereo 3D, and while my memory of this one is far from clear, I'm pretty sure it disabled the 30fps cap and had nigh-on constant tearing.

As usual, the embed is above, and the download linkage is right here: https://digitalfoundry.net/2021-06-29-batman-arkham-city-classic-fps-remastered