As demonstrated in the latest Batman: Arkham Knight video from Nvidia, doing doughnuts with the Batmobile without GameWorks is an empty, soulless experience.
As if the effect of interactive smoke and fog weren’t driven home enough in last week’s GameWorks video, here Nvidia literally drives it home, using Batman’s ride as an example of how good a video game can look when you add enormous amounts of smoke for some reason.
Here is a video I found on YouTube of a real car doing a real doughnut with real tire smoke.
And here is Nvidia’s GameWorks video, demonstrating smoke popping from firing weapons and billowing in great, meaty clouds from Batman’s magical smoke-producing tires.
Damn. Even real life cannot compare to GameWorks. It’s kind of depressing, really, but I guess it jibes with Nvidia’s new GameWorks slogan I just made up: If It’s Not GameWorks You Should Probably Just End It All — There’s No Point Anymore.
Comments
13 responses to “Nvidia Makes Doing Doughnuts In The Batmobile Mean Something”
i would like to see this video with a FPS counter running
And system specs shown too.
I highly doubtful that you’d get a 60fps experience with Gameworks turned on maximum unless you have nVidia’s newest $5000+ video GPU mixed with high end everything else.
Realtime volumetric fluids (fire, smoke, water) aren’t especially difficult depending on what your expectations are. They’ve been around for nearly 10 years in game engines in various forms. For the Gameworks implementation, performance is based on the size of the voxel grid and whether physics is enabled. Nvidia put out a sample last year sometime that used a 512x256x256 grid with physics for a fairly spectacular fire demonstration which ran above 30fps on a 780Ti.
Two things to note there. First, that grid is massive, that’s 33 million voxels updated per frame. Developers including the tech in their games are going to use smaller grids. Even halving each dimension to 256x128x128 reduces the voxel count to only 4 million and gets 8x better performance.
Second, the smoke in the Batman demo above doesn’t appear to have physics enabled. It expands of course, but it doesn’t appear to collide with other entities in the scene. That significantly reduces the performance hit.
It’s hard to say what kind of impact it will have without knowing the settings the developers are going to go with or if they’re configurable through the graphics settings in-game, but I wouldn’t expect a significant drop in performance out of current- or last-generation cards from either manufacturer.
But hey – At least you get Arkhamn Knight for free if you buy their $10000 overclocked super cooled GPU
Impressive but it looks like really uncanny.
For me the biggest reason is it doesn’t disperse fast enough. Especially in the rain, there should be way more wind blowing down that street than there appears to be.
The turret smoke is a nice touch but that tire smoke is just thick velvet bullshit.
Based on the fact the video is 1080p/60 i’d say it’s atleast 60FPS. I’d be interested to know what HW it’s running on however.
I’d wager it’s something like SLI 980TI’s…
I wrote a post above that goes into some detail but it’s still stuck in moderation. Until it does, long story short is it’s particularly expensive.
The whole idea as I understand it is that it’s supposed to be dynamic/interactive; but I didn’t see see anything about the smoke that hasn’t been done before just using particle effects. The only difference here is that the video didn’t show a demo of ‘standard’ fog effects, it was just on or off.
“Nvidia Makes Doing Doughnuts In The Batmobile Mean Something” – yeah, doing doughnuts in the Batmobile means the framerate drops in the ass.
Mike you must have looked damn hard to find that crappy burnout video. There are countless thousands depicting tire smoke that much more closely resemble the second side of your GIF.
But I guess If you chose a suitable one you wouldn’t get to talk about magic and spew a bunch of crap to us all, right?