Players of the latest smash hit, Batman: Arkham Asylum have received a visual treat with its stunning graphics and immersive gameplay, but recently gamers picked up on the fact that those with NVIDIA GPU’s may be a little more privileged than those on the ATI side of the tracks; having the ability to natively enable and adjust AA (Anti-Aliasing).

ATI’s fans cried foul, and this was backed by ATI’s Ian McNaughton in his company blog post, with claims that due to NVIDIA’s backing of the game “the in-game AA option was removed when ATI cards are detected” thus causing unfair results when benchmarked and limiting the owners of ATI graphics cards to poorer visuals.

This was confirmed by AMD testing through alterting the game to not detect ATI id’s: “By tricking the application, we were able to get in-game AA option where our performance was significantly enhanced. This option is not available for the retail game as there is a secure rom.”

AA is not completely unavailable to ATI users however, it can be enabled and controlled through the Catalyst Control centre. “The advantage of in-game AA is that the engine can run AA selectively on scenes whereas Forced AA in CCC is required to use brute force to apply AA on every scene and object, requiring much more work.” says Ian McNaughton.

The game was developed under NVIDIA’s “The Way It’s Meant to Be Played” title and the developers chose to take advantage of NVIDIA’s PhysX and 3D Vision technology, so there is some optimization, however NVIDIA vehemently denies using its clout to purposefully shut out ATI users from the full experience. Instead they call to attention ATI’s lack of foresight in optimizing and being prepared for one of the year’s biggest titles, stating that AMD is the one who left their own customers stranded.

With such harsh accuations by ATI being put forward, Hardware Canucks contacted NVIDIA to see if we could get a response to the dispute. NVIDIA replied with a statement  that may shed some light on the matter, and calls out to AMD to get on the ball with emerging technologies and game development.

“A representative of AMD recently claimed that NVIDIA interfered with anti-aliasing (AA) support for Batman: Arkham Asylum on AMD cards. They also claimed that NVIDIA’s The Way It’s Meant to be Played Program prevents AMD from working with developers for those games.

Both of these claims are NOT true. Batman is based on the Unreal Engine 3, which does not natively support anti-aliasing. We worked closely with Eidos to add AA and QA the feature on GeForce. Nothing prevented AMD from doing the same thing.

Games in The Way It’s Meant to be Played are not exclusive to NVIDIA. AMD can also contact developers and work with them.

We are proud of the work we do in The Way It’s Meant to be Played. We work hard to deliver kickass, game-changing features in PC games like PhysX, AA, and 3D Vision for games like Batman.If AMD wants to deliver innovation for PC games then we encourage them to roll up their sleeves and do the same.”