Arkham Knight PC tech-talk: settings, performance etc

[Jbone]

It's playable for me too really, but I'm going to hold fire until it's spectacular.

Or until I decide it's never going to be spectacular...

[MansizeRooster]

I spent most of yesterday playing this, and it was largely ok. A few frame-rate hiccups, but it was pretty much playable.

[Opinionated Ham Scarecrow]

I've put about 12 hours into the PC version. I wouldn't have known there was a problem with the game had I not read all about it beforehand. Framerate unlocked and with FXAA forced on in NCP because there appeared to be none at all, It runs and looks great.

Maybe I'm just lucky.

[MansizeRooster]

I think I'm only able to get a decent experience because my PC is a beast, it's obvious that on more modestly specced machines it'd be a fucking mess. If I didn't know that it's being worked on to be improved I'd be appalled at the port job evident right now.

[NecroMorrius]

Chummos, there's a Geforce hotfix driver here:

https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/849203/geforce-drivers/announcing-geforce-hotfix-driver-353-38/

It's aimed at fixing a Chrome issue (chrome causing GPU to crash, very annoying!) but it seems to also sneak a SLI profile and some potential tweaks for Batman in as well.

Certainly worth a try.

[robdood]

Is it going to reimplement the missing effects like the missing rain maps etc? That's a bit of a kick in the nuts tbh.

Lazy, shit ports don't get fixed by gpu drivers.

[MansizeRooster]

They were already enabled in the last patch.

[NecroMorrius]

Yeah, rain and AO were switched on in last patch

[Sabreman]

Finished the game last night. As I mentioned way back in the thread I had it running lovely at 1080p 60FPS with everything turned up. Had one crash towards the end but I *think* that was something to do with OBS, as I used to get the same crash when I was streaming Tomb Raider. A friend of mine also ran the game smoothly and his spec is more modest than mine (i5, 8GB, just upgraded to a 960 from a 650). He managed 1080p and locked it to 50FPS.

It's a weird one, and very high-profile, but clearly the game is capable of running perfectly well on various machines. I wouldn't necessarily bring out the pitchforks for WB or Iron Galaxy on it, because there's a good chance all their internal testing brought back positive results. We're trying to bring PC gaming kicking and screaming into the accessible mainstream, but clearly there's some way to go. Diversity is its strength and weakness.

It's a shame the tech talk is detracting from us all being able to enjoy what is, on a purely game experience level, something of a high mark. One of the best 'big' games I've ever played.

[yashiro]

The port wasn't as bad as the drama made out but this media fallout needed to happen.

I wish the media would put a bigger spotlight on the state of PC video drivers to be honest. Both nvidia and amd really suck right now and have so for a number of months.

[Mortis]

I'd say it was an unplayable mess when it launched - I couldn't (and still can't) get it to play at a stable frame rate, it's got texture load issues all over the place and was missing basic effects like AO and its rain effect which were obvious from the first look compared to the consoles.

I'm just glad it all happened after valve put the refund policy in place.

[Matt Defis]

The port was and is as bad as made out, I should easily be playing this maxed at 60 FPS but instead I have to make do with somewhere between 4 and 25 80% of the time.

[Radish]

The port was definitely bad. It's not just performance being poor for many people but the missing features and lack of options (fps lock, disabling motion blur crashing the game for a lot of people etc).

[palaver]

I gave it an hour or so tonight and it seems largely to be okay except for the odd mad stutter-fest and/or audio drop-out.

I can't work out whether the anti-aliasing is rubbish/non-existent or it's just the rain.

[Mortis]

The AA removes a lot of the light sources and rain effect - it's actually better to disable it for now if you want the game to look better. Another of the myriad of "issues" the game has.

[Triple A]

Still running like poo on my GTX 980ti. Holy cow Batman what a fuckup.

Gonna uninstall until sorted, or until I figure it never will be.

[deerokus]

Jim Sterling on top form about this whole situation:

[Retroguy]

I wouldn't necessarily bring out the pitchforks for WB or Iron Galaxy on it, because there's a good chance all their internal testing brought back positive results.

I doubt this very much, if their internal testing was anywhere near competent. The machines that can run it without either the huge FPS dips, textures not loading or crashes (or any combination of the three) are very few and far between.

Plus, all the missing effects that the console versions have, like the rain maps (which were obviously supposed to be in there).

[robdood]

The AA removes a lot of the light sources and rain effect - it's actually better to disable it for now if you want the game to look better. Another of the myriad of "issues" the game has.

Fucking lol! Yeah don't get the pitchforks out for this shit.

[MansizeRooster]

Ok easily the most annoying bug for me right now is the textures not loading in on time. It can take upwards of 10 seconds for them to load in sometimes.

I also had my first crash a couple of nights ago.

[robdood]

Started this last night. I have an i7 4770k and a GTX970.. Dat judder. Jesus wept. It's awful. Low settings don't even seem to change anything! Locking to 30fps still judders.

Fucking train wreck tbh.

[Nespresso]

KOTAKU WITH THE SC00P!

Sources: Warner Bros. Knew That Arkham Knight PC Was A Mess For Months

You can’t buy Batman: Arkham Knight for the PC right now. Warner Bros. pulled it from digital and physical shelves last week, after players found that the PC version had critical performance issues. From what sources tell Kotaku, however, this shouldn’t have been a surprise for Warner Bros.

“I will say that it’s pretty rich for WB to act like they had no idea the game was in such a horrible state,” said one quality assurance tester who worked on the game for years. “It’s been like this for months and all the problems we see now were the exact same, unchanged, almost a year ago.”

Two sources, requesting anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their careers, spoke with Kotaku over the past week in hopes of explaining how the broken PC version of Arkham Knight made it out the door. They both said that Warner Bros. was aware of the many issues facing Arkham Knighton PC and that the publisher chose to ship the game regardless, not to maniacally screw over customers—but because they believed it was good enough.

Warner Bros. did not return my multiple requests for comment.

[deerokus]

Worth nothing that iirc Klepek literally works in the same office as Iron Galaxy (or did when he was at Giant Bomb). So he will have good sources.

edit: Maybe it was Cards Against Humanity's offices actually, but I am sure it was IG's.

[HarryBizzle]

You're commenting on his sources as if any of this comes as a surprise or that there's a chance it isn't 100% true.

[MechE]

Does anyone have any insight into why this is proving so difficult to port to PC. Are there PC bottlenecks that just aren't an issue on the consoles?

[Jbone]

I think it was just a question of priorities. Sounds like the console versions had the same issues, so they delayed the game to fix those, but didn't touch PC.

[Mortis]

So decided it was fine to release in a broken state because at that point the PC users were stuck with it and couldn't get the money back.

Thank god for steam offering refunds at just the right time.

[MansizeRooster]

Does anyone have any insight into why this is proving so difficult to port to PC. Are there PC bottlenecks that just aren't an issue on the consoles?

Apparently the split RAM architecture on PC's is a problem - memory on modern consoles can basically be treated like a big bucket to chuck all your stuff in, but PC has main memory and discrete memory on the graphics card.

When you get stuttering from smoke effects, and textures not loading fast enough, that's from the data not being present on the GPU memory and having to be loaded in.

Kind of ironic, last gen the PS3's split RAM architecture was cited as a major pain in the arse.

Changing the memory allocation to suit the split RAM is no small task, it will be an absolute nightmare to get working.

[Retroguy]

Just emailed CDKeys about getting a refund, their current line is:

We are aware of some game play related issues affecting certain users of Batman Arkham Knight PC.

We are currently looking into the options available to solve this unfortunate problem and will update our customers shortly with a solution.

Sincere apologies for the inconvenience this will no doubt have caused.

That's better than a straight off 'no' I guess. I'll give them a week and drop them another line otherwise.

They're still selling it, only now it's been dropped down even further to £13 for regular edition lol

[Nespresso]

Damn, that's kind of offensive. The price that is.

Hope WB gives all of us on PC the DLC for free or at least some of it. I pre-ordered the game but won't be able to play it a few months down the line (they said it's going to take a while). It's ridiculous really.