Batman: Arkham Knight Batmobile Trailer Demonstrates NVIDIA Gameworks

Nvidia recently released another Batman: Arkham Knight trailer just a week before the game's official release on home consoles and PC. The newest trailer is for PC gamers only, though. It spotlights the GameWorks features in the upcoming title.

The trailer is only a minute long and focuses mainly on the Batmobile because the idea is to give gamers an idea of what sort of graphics and features they'll be able to get out of high-end GameWorks settings turned on.

For instance, the interactive smoke in the trailer is extremely impressive. Smoke effects for the longest were these alpha-blended vectors that were drawn and played pre-animated fade effects. If you look closely at a lot of smoke effects in games they're actually sprites on a vector plane playing the typical dust kick-up animation. However, here, Nvidia has taken it to the next step by making their GameWorks implementation something quite spectacular because the dust and smoke are interactive.

In the Arkham Knight trailer above you can see how the smoke moves independently and even reacts and is affected by force and presence. The Batmobile moving through the smoke causes it to disperse in the same way that moving left and right while firing the Batmobile's cannons in Arkham Knight sees the smoke trail and dissipate according to the direction the cannon is being fired and the way the vehicle is moving.

Over on the official GeForce website they showcase the videos for Batman: Arkham Knight and the PhysX capabilities implemented into the game to give it a more realistic and dynamic feel.

In the previous video they focused on the rain droplets and weather effects in the game, including raindroplets being physical based, and the smoke reacting and changing based on the movement and physical presence. You can check out the other video below.

No matter what your opinion is on Nvidia's GameWorks, you have to admit that looks really, really good.

The major problem is that GameWorks may have elevated particle, smoke and dust simulation to a fair degree, but it comes at a great cost. You will need a top of the line GPU to make use of the GameWorks graphics options.

Previously, gamers ran into a lot of problems with GameWorks in games like Project CARS and The Witcher 3, especially those who had AMD cards where the games would slow to a crawl in their frame-rate. AMD originally blamed Nvidia for the problem but Nvidia passed it off as a problem relegated to AMD cards. The situation proved to fall in AMD's favor when it turned out that owners of Nvidia's Kepler cards complained about the same problems that AMD users were having. The only people who didn't have problems were Maxwell card owners, leading a lot of people to construct conspiracies that Nvidia was out to move more Maxwell product over the Kepler line.

Regardless of the inter-corporate GPU wars going on, Batman: Arkham Knight is due for release on June 23rd next week for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC. If you have a capable of GPU you'll be able to enjoy the GameWorks features in the game. If you don't have a capable GPU then you'll just have to enjoy the trailers above and then turn off the settings when you get into the game.