iGame Radio

With the news that Feral Interactive is bringing Batman: Arkham Asylum to the Mac, the next question on many Mac gamers’ minds is, “Can my Mac run the game.” We don’t have any final system requirements to go by yet, but we can make some assumptions based on another game released by Feral that also came out for Windows about the same time: Borderlands.

Borderlands was released for Windows in October of 2009, and Batman: Arkham Asylum was released in September of the same year. Both have similar gameplay mechanics: action gameplay, fighting mechanics, with Borderlands having more of a first-person shooter bend and Batman leaning towards action-adventure. Both were built on the same game engine, the Unreal Engine 3.

The Windows version of Batman: Arkham Asylum required a 2.8 GHz machine, while Borderlands required 2.4 GHz. When Feral released Borderlands for the Mac, their minimum requirements were for a 1.4 GHz Intel machine, though a 2.8 GHz machine was recommended. We’re currently playing Borderlands on a 2.66 GHz machine and find that it runs fine, though we do experience a little slowing in the beginning when the game starts each time. Chances are that Batman will have a similar spread of minimum/recommended, most probably bumped up slightly such as 1.6 GHz/3.0 GHz or something similar.

RAM should be increased, as Borderlands for both Mac and Windows needs 1 GB minimum, but Batman for Windows requires a minimum of 2GB for Windows XP (3GB for Vista or Windows 7…wow, memory hogs). So we’ll probably see 2 GB for Batman: Arkham Asylum for the Mac, though whether that will be minimum or not is iffy.

The biggest question is the graphics cards. Borderlands needed a minimum of NVIDIA Geforce 8600 GS or ATI Radeon HD3000 Series, which translated to the Mac version as graphics cards above the ATI X1xxx series and NVIDIA 7xxx series. But Batman: Arkham Asylum for Windows needs Nvidia 9800 GT or ATI HD 4850 or higher. Will this mean that the graphics card requirements for the Mac version will be increased? Hard to say, but since the graphics requirements for Batman are higher than Borderlands by an entire series for both Nvidia and ATI, we may see a bump in graphics requirements.

If that is the case, we may be looking at the following spread of machines to run the game: Mac Pro from 2008 and later, iMacs from early 2008 or later, Macbook Pros from 2009 or later, and if you’re lucky and the minimum requirements are that low, you might be able to run it on a later Macbook Air. But don’t count on it.

We’ll wait and see whether the official requirements match our speculations.