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[Gaz_RB]

Post processing AA, which is an effect generally applied after a frame has been rendered. This is stuff like FXAA and TXAA. It looks at the rendered frame data and, using smoothing algorithms, attempts to clean up jagged edges on the image. Post processing AA has the smallest impact on performance.

MSAA/SSAA are AA implementations that are generally part of the rendering process itself. MSAA/SSAA are brute force methods of AA and, on average, can be very expensive. SSAA in particular is very expensive as it renders scenes at higher resolutions than what you're actually playing, and downsamples the data in an effort to clean up aliasing. MSAA is less expensive, but can still have a large impact on performance.

Quality is mixed across the board. Ideally the best form of AA simply in terms of image quality is SSAA. It's basically saying "let's render everything at fucking stupid resolutions so we have a lot more data, then shrink it down". Unsurprisingly, it's also expensive as fuck. MSAA is a "results are mixed" case. Often it works really well if at a cost, but the advent of modern rendering engines has caused a clash. MSAA doesn't always play nice with aliasing on shaders, and going into next gen we'll be seeing a lot more deferred rendering, which is very difficult to get working nicely with MSAA (see: Battlefield 3).

This is why a lot of engines are opting for post processing AA solutions, like FXAA, because it's generally inexpensive. Results are mixed, but a lot of people hate it, because the idea of applying AA as a post processing solution, after a scene has been rendered with jaggies intact, is a recipe for image blur as that's the laziest method. There's a lot of games out there where turning on FXAA is like smudging vaseline over the screen. The jaggies are gone, but the cost of sharp image quality is very high. But a lot of this comes down to the algorithms and methods used, and programmers are trying to find methods that implement both post-AA and render-AA together. TXAA High in Arkham Origins combines 8xMSAA with post processing for it's own thing. Metro: Last Light has a post-AA built into the engine that cannot be turned off, and looks great with SSAA sharpening the image. SMAA is also a pretty nice post AA that keeps the image sharp while trying to clean up jaggies.

Thanks for this, been sorta iffy on how AA worked for a while now.

I've been playing Batman:AO on my mid range PC with FXAA and I don't really mind it too much. Better than nothing if you can't do MSAA.

 

[JohngPR]

I've been using FXAA and then the lumasharpen option when I inject SMAA to reduce the blurriness you get from it. It worked out pretty well in Tomb Raider and seems to work well here.

 

[Dave_6]

Post processing AA, which is an effect generally applied after a frame has been rendered. This is stuff like FXAA and TXAA. It looks at the rendered frame data and, using smoothing algorithms, attempts to clean up jagged edges on the image. Post processing AA has the smallest impact on performance.

MSAA/SSAA are AA implementations that are generally part of the rendering process itself. MSAA/SSAA are brute force methods of AA and, on average, can be very expensive. SSAA in particular is very expensive as it renders scenes at higher resolutions than what you're actually playing, and downsamples the data in an effort to clean up aliasing. MSAA is less expensive, but can still have a large impact on performance.

Quality is mixed across the board. Ideally the best form of AA simply in terms of image quality is SSAA. It's basically saying "let's render everything at fucking stupid resolutions so we have a lot more data, then shrink it down". Unsurprisingly, it's also expensive as fuck. MSAA is a "results are mixed" case. Often it works really well if at a cost, but the advent of modern rendering engines has caused a clash. MSAA doesn't always play nice with aliasing on shaders, and going into next gen we'll be seeing a lot more deferred rendering, which is very difficult to get working nicely with MSAA (see: Battlefield 3).

This is why a lot of engines are opting for post processing AA solutions, like FXAA, because it's generally inexpensive. Results are mixed, but a lot of people hate it, because the idea of applying AA as a post processing solution, after a scene has been rendered with jaggies intact, is a recipe for image blur as that's the laziest method. There's a lot of games out there where turning on FXAA is like smudging vaseline over the screen. The jaggies are gone, but the cost of sharp image quality is very high. But a lot of this comes down to the algorithms and methods used, and programmers are trying to find methods that implement both post-AA and render-AA together. TXAA High in Arkham Origins combines 8xMSAA with post processing for it's own thing. Metro: Last Light has a post-AA built into the engine that cannot be turned off, and looks great with SSAA sharpening the image. SMAA is also a pretty nice post AA that keeps the image sharp while trying to clean up jaggies.

Thanks for this very informative post!

 

[justjim89]

i recommend unistalling the drivers with this app and reinstalling. remember these are beta drivers.

sorry for the late reply.

Thanks, I'll give that a shot. I'm not terribly concerned about game performance, as the game itself is very much playable, but I still can't get the cutscenes to run well. No fucking idea what to do. My laptop may just be running hot and that could be fucking it up.

 

[dEvAnGeL]

What's your CPU?

Getting 99% usage here.

i7 2600k @ 4.2, my CPU is not the problem because in every game but this one I get 99% usage, really weird

 

[Garteal]

i7 2600k @ 4.2, my CPU is not the problem because in every game but this one I get 99% usage, really weird

Yeah, there's no CPU bottleneck then.
You're running the game on the maximum settings right?
Are you on the latest drivers?

 

[dEvAnGeL]

Yeah, there's no CPU bottleneck then.
You're running the game on the maximum settings right?
Are you on the latest drivers?

Yes, I'm gonna do a fresh install to see if that solves the problem

 

[RazorbackDB]

Thanks, I'll give that a shot. I'm not terribly concerned about game performance, as the game itself is very much playable, but I still can't get the cutscenes to run well. No fucking idea what to do. My laptop may just be running hot and that could be fucking it up.

if you are using a laptop then that's the problem, i linked to the desktop driver sorry about that. Here is the full link with the mobility driver.

 

[Lostconfused]

Quality is mixed across the board. Ideally the best form of AA simply in terms of image quality is SSAA. It's basically saying "let's render everything at fucking stupid resolutions so we have a lot more data, then shrink it down". Unsurprisingly, it's also expensive as fuck.

But it looks so good. Also it usually involves doing something dumb like runing a game in DX9, adding proper AA comparability bits, and only going as high as 2xSGSSAA to maintain a relatively steady 120 FPS rate.

Spoiler

Screenshot above is 4xSGSSAA

 

[justjim89]

if you are using a laptop then that's the problem, i linked to the desktop driver sorry about that. Here is the full link with the mobility driver.

Hmmm, it says not compatible because my computer doesn't have a proper graphics adapter. Odd because it let me install the other one you linked to yesterday.

 

[Timu]

My benchmark at 1440p:

 

[Nokterian]

Wow that is nice what are you running with?

My specs btw :

I7-2600k 3,4ghz
GTX 780 3gb
16gig memory
Windows 8.1 64Bit
120 gig ssd
2 tb hdd

 

[Korezo]

Where is the benchmark people are using?

 

[j0hnny_385]

Where is the benchmark people are using?

http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Batman:_Arkham_Origins#Benchmark

 

[Timu]

Wow that is nice what are you running with?

My specs btw :

I7-2600k 3,4ghz
GTX 780 3gb
16gig memory
Windows 8.1 64Bit
120 gig ssd
2 tb hdd

Thanks and:
i5-2500k
2 4GB GTX 670s in SLI
8GB DDR3 1600 RAM

 

[crun]

11 minutes gameplay long, fighting and travelling through the city

ohhh. its 1080p ofc

 

[v1lla21]

Anyone with similar specs as me that has the game
I5-3570k
HD7950
8GB Ram
Windows 8
And playing @1080?

What settings are you playing at? I'm not getting the game until next Friday since it's when I get paid.

 

[Elsolar]

Post processing AA, which is an effect generally applied after a frame has been rendered. This is stuff like FXAA and TXAA. It looks at the rendered frame data and, using smoothing algorithms, attempts to clean up jagged edges on the image. Post processing AA has the smallest impact on performance.

MSAA/SSAA are AA implementations that are generally part of the rendering process itself. MSAA/SSAA are brute force methods of AA and, on average, can be very expensive. SSAA in particular is very expensive as it renders scenes at higher resolutions than what you're actually playing, and downsamples the data in an effort to clean up aliasing. MSAA is less expensive, but can still have a large impact on performance.

Quality is mixed across the board. Ideally the best form of AA simply in terms of image quality is SSAA. It's basically saying "let's render everything at fucking stupid resolutions so we have a lot more data, then shrink it down". Unsurprisingly, it's also expensive as fuck. MSAA is a "results are mixed" case. Often it works really well if at a cost, but the advent of modern rendering engines has caused a clash. MSAA doesn't always play nice with aliasing on shaders, and going into next gen we'll be seeing a lot more deferred rendering, which is very difficult to get working nicely with MSAA (see: Battlefield 3).

This is why a lot of engines are opting for post processing AA solutions, like FXAA, because it's generally inexpensive. Results are mixed, but a lot of people hate it, because the idea of applying AA as a post processing solution, after a scene has been rendered with jaggies intact, is a recipe for image blur as that's the laziest method. There's a lot of games out there where turning on FXAA is like smudging vaseline over the screen. The jaggies are gone, but the cost of sharp image quality is very high. But a lot of this comes down to the algorithms and methods used, and programmers are trying to find methods that implement both post-AA and render-AA together. TXAA High in Arkham Origins combines 8xMSAA with post processing for it's own thing. Metro: Last Light has a post-AA built into the engine that cannot be turned off, and looks great with SSAA sharpening the image. SMAA is also a pretty nice post AA that keeps the image sharp while trying to clean up jaggies.

Great post, just gonna nit-pick and expand upon a couple things

- TXAA is not an exclusively post-process AA method. It uses a combination of FXAA, MSAA, and some propriety Nvidia fairy dust. It's main claim to fame is that it reduces temporal aliasing and shimmering much more effectively than generic FXAA+MSAA.

- MSAA is perfectly compatible with modern game engines, but the relative cost of multi-sampling is rising dramatically. Deferred rendering is the main culprit of this. As engines become more and more deferred (meaning they store different kinds of scene information in different buffers), MSAA needs to work harder and harder to multi-sample each of those individual buffers. 4A Games recently went so far as to say that MSAA is dead in the water precisely because of the redundant calculations needed to apply it to all the different buffers in a modern game engine. It's easy to see why they feel this way. Remember the MSAA in Crysis 3? Yeah, Crytek went for the most high-quality, inclusive MSAA implementation they could, making sure it correctly accounted for HDR, blur, water, reflections, etc., and as a result MSAA in Crysis 3 is stupidly expensive.

- FXAA really isn't the "laziest" solution. The mathematicians who created it certainly aren't lazy, that's for sure! I'd say the "laziest" AA method would have to be super sampling, since it doesn't require any additional math. Just "render more pixels!" then down sample. Brute-forcing the problem.

 

[KHlover]

To give you guys another perspective, happy user of an old-ass Gaming-PC here.

8GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 4850 1GB
Intel Core2Duo E8500@ 4.0Ghz

Playing at a resolution of 1280x1024, Geometry Details set to medium, every effect except PhysX activated. Getting around 80fps at all times, even during bigger fight scenes.

I'd love to increase the Geometry Details, but the game outright doesn't let me change it. Any idea? :/

 

[RazorbackDB]

Hmmm, it says not compatible because my computer doesn't have a proper graphics adapter. Odd because it let me install the other one you linked to yesterday.

well then i don't really know what problem could be, sorry i'm not able to help.

 

[HT UK]

i7 870 @ 2.93GHz
GTX 580 1.5GB
8GB RAM
1080p

PhysX - Off

PhysX - Normal

PhysX - High

 

[No Love]

i7 2600k @ 4.2, my CPU is not the problem because in every game but this one I get 99% usage, really weird

Yeah, there's no CPU bottleneck then.
You're running the game on the maximum settings right?
Are you on the latest drivers?

PSA guys:

This game IS CPU bottlenecked @ 1080p. It is NOT CPU bottlenecked at 1440p and above. At least with Nvidia cards, anyways. Radeons have some weird issues going on.

1080p GTX 770

1440p GTX 770

1080p Radeon 7970

1440p Radeon 7970

Source: http://www.hardwarepal.com/batman-arkham-origins-benchmark/5/

 

[ambientmystic]

To give you guys another perspective, happy user of an old-ass Gaming-PC here.

8GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 4850 1GB
Intel Core2Duo E8500@ 4.0Ghz

Playing at a resolution of 1280x1024, Geometry Details set to medium, every effect except PhysX activated. Getting around 80fps at all times, even during bigger fight scenes.

I'd love to increase the Geometry Details, but the game outright doesn't let me change it. Any idea? :/

Can only go higher with a DX11 card. Most of the options are either Normal or DX 11 Enhanced. So you're basically running it in DX9/10 mode, which is cake for even older cards like yours and mine (running it on a Core 2 @ 2.8 GHz and a ATI Radeon 4670 here lol)

 

[Damian.]

A little further into the game and some spots with a lot of PhysX debris can sometimes get pretty sluggish. IE here:

frames go from a solid 60 to 40-45 and it is very sluggish and juddery. GPU usage is also at 50-60% on both of my 680s here. Any solutions?

 

[No Love]

A little further into the game and some spots with a lot of PhysX debris can sometimes get pretty sluggish. IE here:

frames go from a solid 60 to 40-45 and it is very sluggish and juddery. GPU usage is also at 50-60% on both of my 680s here. Any solutions?

Overclock. Your 680's are too weak.

Is this at 1080p or above? If at 1080p, downsample from 1440p to put more load on the GPU's.

 

[Damian.]

This is at 1080p. They are both overclocked +110 on core and +250 on the memory. CPU is a 2600k@4.6 as well. I didn't check my CPU usage here, let me look really quick.

CPU usage during this area:

 

[No Love]

This is at 1080p. They are both overclocked +110 on core and +250 on the memory. CPU is a 2600k@4.6 as well. I didn't check my CPU usage here, let me look really quick.

Downsample. It will put more load on your GPU's. Try 2560x1440.

 

[Damian.]

Downsample. It will put more load on your GPU's. Try 2560x1440.

I am playing on my television as a second monitor, and I have trouble downsampling with the setup. I would if I was playing at my desk. Interestingly, if I take load off of the GPU by lowering AA to off from TXAA I get an almost 60fps there with only a couple dips if I move a lot of the debris around. FXAA-TXAA all get me the same performance here.

 

[No Love]

I am playing on my television as a second monitor, and I have trouble downsampling with the setup. I would if I was playing at my desk. Interestingly, if I take load off of the GPU by lowering AA to off from TXAA I get an almost 60fps there with only a couple dips if I move a lot of the debris around. FXAA-TXAA all get me the same performance here.

Weird. I assumed if the GPU load was dipping that it'd be a CPU thing. What if you just use 8x MSAA? Better performance than with TXAA?

 

[Damian.]

8xMSAA makes the FPS dip to the 30's in this particular scene. WTF. CPU/GPU usage is still roughly the same as well. These kind of drops I am expecting the GPUs to be working at 100%.

 

[BY2K]

i7 4770k 3.5GHz
16BG DDR3 RAM
Radeon 7970 3GB

I have no fucking clue why the framerate dropped so low during the interior segment.

 

[Lostconfused]

8xMSAA makes the FPS dip to the 30's in this particular scene. WTF. CPU/GPU usage is still roughly the same as well. These kind of drops I am expecting the GPUs to be working at 100%.

Guess that means its GPU limited since I would imagine 8xMSAA is more demanding than TXAA and physx performance is not indicated by GPU load.

 

[Damian.]

Turning PhysX off and I get a perfect 60fps here and framerate upcapped it is well over 100. From Mafia 2 to Borderlands 2 to Metro:LL to AC to this game. PhysX just runs like absolute dogshit on my machine, and I have never figured out why. I absolutely fucking give up on the technology.

 

[VisceralBowl]

Turning PhysX off and I get a perfect 60fps here and framerate upcapped it is well over 100. From Mafia 2 to Borderlands 2 to Metro:LL to AC to this game. PhysX just runs like absolute dogshit on my machine, and I have never figured out why. I absolutely fucking give up on the technology.

Did you set it to run off the GPU rather than CPU?

 

[Mideon]

Finished the game. No bugs to speak of except the comm tower one. Ran perfect all the way through with everything on max. The only thing that bothered me was that the video cutscenes were all blurry and seemed to be 720p not 1080p really ruined the atmosphere everytime they came on.

 

[Lostconfused]

Turning PhysX off and I get a perfect 60fps here and framerate upcapped it is well over 100. From Mafia 2 to Borderlands 2 to Metro:LL to AC to this game. PhysX just runs like absolute dogshit on my machine, and I have never figured out why. I absolutely fucking give up on the technology.

It's probably just the how it works. In Arkham City I got 68 FPS with just a few papers blowing across the floor in a tiny room when without it the game would run at 120 fps with less than 50% gpu load.

Edit: Well if Unreal Engine doesn't maintain it's popularity into the next generation we might not see that much more of physx anyway.

 

[Damian.]

Did you set it to run off the GPU rather than CPU?

Always. Auto select, manual selecting PhysX for the second GPU both produce the same effects. If I set CPU to do PhysX then I get FPS in the teens and single digits, so it's definitely not that.

 

[JaseC]

Specs: i7 2600K @ 4.6GHz, 8GB DDR3-1600, 2x 2GB overclocked GTX 670s, Win7 x64
Settings (1680x1050): Maxed (DX11) unless otherwise noted

4x MSAA + High PhysX

4x MSAA + No PhysX

Relative differences (off versus high):
Minimum: +46fps
Average: +89fps
Maximum: +148fps

PhysX seems to almost literally halve the framerate. Dedicating one of the GPUs to the cause caused the minimum FPS to jump up by a mere 6fps but a modest increase elsewhere:

Relative differences (dedicated GPU versus non-dedicated GPU):
Minimum: +6fps
Average: +16fps
Maximum: +44fps

If you have two higher-end Nvidia GPUs and would like to enjoy PhysX, forgoing SLI in favour of a dedicated PhysX processor appears to be the ideal solution. By the time I actually get around to playing the game I'll probably be on two 870s, though.

Edit: Muddled up the average and maximum FPS values in the final section. Fixed.

 

[No Love]

Specs: i7 2600K @ 4.6GHz, 8GB DDR3-1600, 2x 2GB overclocked GTX 670s, Win7 x64
Settings (1680x1050): Maxed (DX11) unless otherwise noted

4x MSAA + High PhysX


4x MSAA + No PhysX


Relative differences (off versus high):
Minimum: +46fps
Average: +89fps
Maximum: +148fps

PhysX seems to almost literally halve the framerate. Dedicating one of the GPUs to the cause caused the minimum FPS jump up by a mere 6fps but a modest increase elsewhere:


Relative differences (dedicated GPU versus non-dedicated GPU):
Minimum: +6fps
Average: +44fps
Maximum: +16fps

If you have two higher-end Nvidia GPUs and would like to enjoy PhysX, forgoing SLI in favour of a dedicated PhysX processor appears to be the ideal solution. By the time I actually get around to playing the game I'll probably be on two 870s, though.

Awesome testing + info. I guess I will put my GTX 760 in as a 3rd GPU to the two 780's and dedicate it to PhysX just to see the increases in oerformance. Right now at 2160p with everything maxed and PhysX on high I'm at 60 FPS locked but it'd be cool to uncap the framerate and see how it does. Hopefully my 760w PSU can handle two 780s, GTX 760 doing physx and 3750k at 4.5 ghz... if it blows up, oh well.

 

[TheVampire]

How does think rank?

GTX TITAN
i7 3770k @ 4.4GHZ
8GB RAM
SSD
WIN7

 

[EatChildren]

Great post, just gonna nit-pick and expand upon a couple things

- TXAA is not an exclusively post-process AA method. It uses a combination of FXAA, MSAA, and some propriety Nvidia fairy dust. It's main claim to fame is that it reduces temporal aliasing and shimmering much more effectively than generic FXAA+MSAA.

- MSAA is perfectly compatible with modern game engines, but the relative cost of multi-sampling is rising dramatically. Deferred rendering is the main culprit of this. As engines become more and more deferred (meaning they store different kinds of scene information in different buffers), MSAA needs to work harder and harder to multi-sample each of those individual buffers. 4A Games recently went so far as to say that MSAA is dead in the water precisely because of the redundant calculations needed to apply it to all the different buffers in a modern game engine. It's easy to see why they feel this way. Remember the MSAA in Crysis 3? Yeah, Crytek went for the most high-quality, inclusive MSAA implementation they could, making sure it correctly accounted for HDR, blur, water, reflections, etc., and as a result MSAA in Crysis 3 is stupidly expensive.

- FXAA really isn't the "laziest" solution. The mathematicians who created it certainly aren't lazy, that's for sure! I'd say the "laziest" AA method would have to be super sampling, since it doesn't require any additional math. Just "render more pixels!" then down sample. Brute-forcing the problem.

Great post. I should have added the disclaimer that I don't really know the ins and outs of the technology, mostly just what I've been taught/learned through experience.

Overclock. Your 680's are too weak.

Is this at 1080p or above? If at 1080p, downsample from 1440p to put more load on the GPU's.

Tangent, but I've never really understood what "GPU Power" read in MSI Afterburner means. For example, playing Arkham Origins, my "Power %" caps out around 78. Which I assume means it's using 78%. I don't know why it wouldn't use 100%, from a technological perspective. Unless it means there's headroom on the GPU for doing other things that general 3D rendering performance cant fill.

 

[Barnzini]

How does think rank?

GTX TITAN
i7 3770k @ 4.4GHZ
8GB RAM
SSD
WIN7

3570k @ 4.2
OC 670
Win 8.1

Runs better than i thought it would with all the candy turned on

 

[Lostconfused]

Tangent, but I've never really understood what "GPU Power" read in MSI Afterburner means. For example, playing Arkham Origins, my "Power %" caps out around 78. Which I assume means it's using 78%. I don't know why it wouldn't use 100%, from a technological perspective. Unless it means there's headroom on the GPU for doing other things that general 3D rendering performance cant fill.

If you mean GPU usage than yes it would mean that the GPU has headroom and is under utilized. Either because you are running at a locked frame rate with vsync, game engine locked frame rate or are limited by the CPU.

 

[GrazGamer]

I am playing with an Alienware x51, i7 with GTX660.

My problem with the last 2 Arkham games on PC, haven't played AA, is the lack of triple buffering so it's either 60 or 30 fps with vsync and the juddering between the 2 is just too frequent.

GEFORCE Experience doesn't help either because it aims for 40fps with its settings, which basically means you will only ever get 30 fps with vsync.

With AO I can drop the physx to normal for a constant 60 but I like my eye candy too much to lose settings. I have tried with adaptive vsync and can see I hover around 60 with minor drops to 50-55 regularly enough that tearing becomes an ugly distraction. With AC it is down to 45 at times.

My normal solution to this is to enable 1/2 refresh rate vsync as I have no problem with locked 30fps but both AC and AO end up with load times in excess of 2 mins with this enabled for some reason.

Thankfully I have now found an ini change to lock the fps to 30 and both games are maxed and smooth with no tearing AND I can enable TXAA at max settings.

 

[vg260]

I'm running a 660Ti at 1080p with all settings maxed at dx11, and it's pretty close to 60 fps, but I might want to cut down a couple things to give a little extra room for drops. Aside from AA settings and PhysX, what would be next setting drop down that would give the biggest performance boost with least noticeable difference? Shadows? Lighting? (forget what they're called)

 

[riflen]

A little further into the game and some spots with a lot of PhysX debris can sometimes get pretty sluggish. IE here:

frames go from a solid 60 to 40-45 and it is very sluggish and juddery. GPU usage is also at 50-60% on both of my 680s here. Any solutions?

This exact kind of thing happens with Borderlands 2, another Unreal Engine 3 game with PhysX. Even when CPU and GPU(s) have plenty of headroom available, the framerate will tank on occasion when facing a particular area.

Telling him his GPUs are too weak is disingenuous. If I'm right and it's simply a problem inherant to the technologies, then there is probably nothing you can do. You can ease the pain though by downsampling and pegging those GPUs to make yourself feel better. =)

 

[No Love]

Tangent, but I've never really understood what "GPU Power" read in MSI Afterburner means. For example, playing Arkham Origins, my "Power %" caps out around 78. Which I assume means it's using 78%. I don't know why it wouldn't use 100%, from a technological perspective. Unless it means there's headroom on the GPU for doing other things that general 3D rendering performance cant fill.

GPU power % is a measurement of how much of your maximum TDP you are using. Hence why it's not always at 100%, unlike say usage.

Telling him his GPUs are too weak is disingenuous. If I'm right and it's simply a problem inherant to the technologies, then there is probably nothing you can do. You can ease the pain though by downsampling and pegging those GPUs to make yourself feel better. =)

It's called a joke, little buddy.

 

[Damian.]

It's such a bizarre problem, everything up until this seemingly simple scene ran great. PhysX on max around the city netted me 60+ FPS at all times unless I was fighting 20 guys, then I would drop to the mid 50's understandably. But to tank to 40 here just looking at floor debris that isn't moving is ridiculous.

Side note, my Borderlands 2 performance the past month or so has been OK for the most part with PhysX on. Took a full year though and 99% of my playtime had to be with PhysX off.

 

[Windom Earle]

This exact kind of thing happens with Borderlands 2, another Unreal Engine 3 game with PhysX. Even when CPU and GPU(s) have plenty of headroom available, the framerate will tank on occasion when facing a particular area.

Telling him his GPUs are too weak is disingenuous. If I'm right and it's simply a problem inherant to the technologies, then there is probably nothing you can do. You can ease the pain though by downsampling and pegging those GPUs to make yourself feel better. =)

Yes, PhysX can look very nice, but the performance hits are laughable at times.
I am wondering if there will be more areas like this in the game or if I should turn it back on. I hate frame drops.

 

[JaseC]

Piss-poor optimisation is a problem that plagues PhysX and I wish Nvidia were more proactive about stamping it out rather than indirectly encouraging it. Really, the only way to run a recent release with hardware-accelerated PhysX enabled and not encounter noticeable performance drops is to revisit the game two or three GPU generations later.