Benchmark Results: Batman: Arkham City
Starting at 1680x1050, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 660 Ti easily handles the Extreme detail preset with 8x MSAA enabled. We set tessellation level to Normal because there's little advantage to setting it any higher. Also, we disable PhysX to keep our results comparable (though it's worth noting that turning PhysX on gives the GeForce cards a visual advantage in certain areas of the game that AMD's boards can't match).
There's a frame rate drop at the beginning of the benchmark, but that's a glitch that occurs when the test switches between scenes. Thus, none of these solutions drop below 40 FPS during the part of the test that represents game play.
The same performance dip affects 1920x1080, but only Nvidia's GeForce GTX 580 is forced below 40 FPS during the rendered part of the test. All of the cards we're testing perform well, and although the Radeon HD 7870 and GeForce GTX 660 Ti are clearly competitors, the 7870 takes a measurable lead. The GeForce GTX 670 and Radeon HD 7950 perform similarly, and the Radeon HD 7970 leads.
In order to realize playable performance at 2560x1600, we had to drop multi-sample anti-aliasing to 4x, leaving tessellation at Normal and detail preset at Extreme. Ignoring the dip we see yet again, all three Radeons and Nvidia's GeForce GTX 580 suffer a slight drop to about 35 FPS at one point in the benchmark.
The settings we used for testing are very important. Nvidia's marketing material shows the GeForce GTX 660 Ti with a notable lead in Batman: Arkham Asylum. Indeed, when we used the same settings, the GTX 660 Ti beat AMD's Radeon HD 7870 by a margin of 84.5 to 76.7 FPS. Just remember that differences in architecture, memory bandwidth, and clock rates favor certain benchmark configurations. We picked our visual output to deliberately maximize what you can get from Nvidia's newest card, and we're quite comfortable with the combination of quality and performance.
