Batman AK under the microscope

Driftwood
Tuesday, June 23, 2015 | 10:30 AM
3 comments

GSY Tech PC PS4 Xbox One

Because we feared you might be overwhelmed by the number of videos of Batman: Arkham Knight we captured, so we finally decided to dedicate a special news article to our analysis videos if the Xbox One version. Note that these videos benefit from Blimblim's 1.02 version of our analysis plugin which can now spot tearing (yeah!).

BlimBlim walks you through the new plugin

This new version of my framerate analysis plugin adds the much needed tearing detection functionality, which was mandatory considering how tearing-happy the Batmobile sequences can be on Xbox One. What's tearing you'll ask me? A game like Batman runs at 30 frames per second, which means it has 33 ms to do all it needs to do and to fully render a new image. So if for some reason the engine is late and, like it is the case here, it doesn't use vsync (which ensures only full frames are displayed, at the expense of other things), then it will display whatever was ready at the end of the 33 ms period, and the rest of the image will be stuck to the previous one. This creates a horizontal tear in the image, hence the name tearing. My plugin detects this tear, and decides if it should be counted as a new frame or not. Visually this is shown in the graph as a vertical bar that's scaled according to the height of the tear. A white bar will be considered a new frame, and a yellow bar shows it was ignored. It's all very simple in fact, but I have to admit the first times I got the plugin to work I was surprised by some of the graphs I was seeing. :)