Arkham Knight PC tech-talk: settings, performance etc

[Larsen B]

I had stuttering in cutscenes and drops during fights and the Batmobile when I played it on Tuesday so was definitely in the majority.

Last night though, I installed the AMD beta drivers, moved the game to my SSD, removed the intro videos and suddenly it worked without any hitching or wild frame drops. Everything turned up to the highest Normal it would go and it didn't move from 30fps.

Obviously it didn't magically put the missing effects in but as far as being able to play it and not go "what the hell?", it was great.

[footle]

So is this the first game where we might be legitimately seeing a difference (perhaps for incompetent coding) between the various different ram pool sizes?

[Mortis]

No it's just another shoddy port job - after all it's an unreal 3 engine game - an engine that's been used extensively on PC for years.

WB basically put rocksteady on the consoles and farmed out the PC version to the cheapest 3rd party they could use and when it came back in a state they ignored QA - upped the specs, locked the frame rate and just pushed it out. They probably didn't expect steam to announce refunds a week or 2 before hand though.

[DarhkFox]

Which is strange because Origins got blasted on the PC for being buggy but i never had any problems with glitches - and the framerate was fine.

[Mortis]

Origins had bugs that could break the game or glitch but the engine performance (in DX10 mode at least) was fine - and it also gave you a host of options to disable if you needed a few extra FPS (like AO).

[Opinionated Ham Scarecrow]

WB suspending sales of this tells me the patch might be a long wait...

[The Fox]

In that case I'm going on a Skellige boat trip and rounding up every motherfucking last '?'

[MansizeRooster]

http://www.kitguru.net/gaming/development/matthew-wilson/arkham-knight-pc-port-was-outsourced-to-a-console-studio/

[Mortis]

Not purely a Console studio they also did work on the PC version of Origins and Bioshock 2 DLC and Infinite so not exactly a shoddy record in that regards

[RubberJohnny]

Yeah Bioshock in particular was a really good port - GAF have datamined the steam internal dev stuff and say they only had the Arkham Knight for 2 months, which is the real issue.

[simms]

I knew something was up when you had to do an ini tweak to get above 30fps. For all the saving on money to outsource this it's going to probably cost them more to patch up* not to mention the loss of goodwill. The new steam refund policy implementation was timed to perfection.

* it will be interesting to see what kind of agreement was drafted for the outsourcing. I wonder what the financial penalties are for either side based on poor quality of the port and it's subsequent removal from the market.

[deerokus]

Poor Dave Lang.

[Opinionated Ham Scarecrow]

Has any one else had issues even getting it downloaded?

I started preloading this on Monday whilst I watched a film and got to 11gb. Switched off.

When I resumed on Tuesday the download had reset to 0. I started again and got to 27gb.

Came home yesterday and it started from 0 again...

Steam has never done this. I can only assume that this is the most broken game ever as I can't even download it to experience the issues.

[Mortis]

I know if it did a file verify it was deleting the full game and restarting so maybe stopping and starting the download makes it verify files again?

[deerokus]

The thing about this is that WB obviously knew it was like this - they bumped up the requirements right before launch - but chanced their arm they'd get away with it.

There's a long comment on Giant Bomb's story I will paste below which seems like a pretty feasible rationale for part of why it's so fucked:

That is true but there is a lot more to it than that. Maybe Rocksteady didn't get Iron Galaxy the assets soon enough, or maybe WB didn't give Iron Galaxy enough time to do the port. Or Iron Galaxy underestimated how long it would take. Or maybe there were driver issues that Nvidia/AMD promised would be optimized by launch and that didn't pan out. Or maybe Rocksteady's alterations to the UE3 texture streaming system made a simple PC port incredibly difficult. My understanding is that stuttering from texture streaming is the issue at hand. Generally this is caused when a game goes over its VRAM budget and has to use system RAM to store textures. On consoles there is no split RAM. Everything runs off a single system on a chip, so as long as the studio really optimizes the number of draw calls it is making, stuttering shouldn't be an issue.

Basically, I would bet Rocksteady rebuilt the UE3 compiler to allow for fewer total draw calls as consoles are far more CPU limited than RAM limited. The opposite is true for a lot of PC's. Up until a couple months ago, the only card that had as much VRAM as a console was the Titan. Now there are a handful of others but none under the $500 mark. The other possibility is that the game simply didn't have its config settings set correctly in the master, and players just need to go into the .ini file and tell the game to use all of their available RAM.

Or there could be any number of other issues, but if asset streaming is once more at the core of a botched open world game then it continues to show just how badly Microsoft messed up with DX11 considering draw calls will be getting a 2000% performance boost when DX12 comes out. I have an older computer and I was just playing Ghost Recon Future Soldier. With DX11 on the game ran at no more than 20 fps even with all DX11 exclusive settings turned off. When I switched back to DX9, using identical settings, the game ran between 45 and 60 fps. No visual change, no settings tweaking. I just swapped from one API to the other and got that boost. That will fix most of the problems with Ubisoft's games and with a variety of other titles.

EDIT: Just checked Digital Foundry and they finally have some numbers up, the most important of which is this one: At 720p with all settings set to their lowest the game was still using 2.7 GB of RAM. That means a 3 GB card is the minimum requirement to run the game and most likely you'll be wanting either the brand new this week Radeon 390x with its 8 GB or RAM or the Geforce Titan X with its 12 GB of RAM to play at 1080p/60. So basically, anyone with a less than $500 graphics card shouldn't be running the game at 1080p. I can't say I'm surprised that console performance recommends 4 GB of VRAM as the consoles have access to as much as 6 GB. What is surprising is how poorly the game scales to older graphics cards considering this is a UE3 game. Seems to me that Rocksteady brute forced their way to the visual quality seen on the consoles by loading massive chunks of data straight into RAM, bypassing the streaming issues that have been destroying console performance this generation but making a PC port incredibly difficult to do without major engine changes.

I would bet those with a 2 GB graphics card would be able to get by if they load the game onto an SSD, but looking at the performance profile we are suffering from a game that was heavily optimized for consoles with no thought put into making it work on anything but the highest end PC.

Dunno about the missing effects, though. SSAO is built right into UE3. It should be as easy as checking a box to turn it on. The missing rain effects could be the result of Rocksready building a software level solution that didn't port well to DX11 for whatever reason. Ubisoft ran into a similar issue with its AA solution for Assassin's Creed Unity. Couldn't make it work with DX11 so PC players just have to brute force it. But there are DX11 AA features built into the API, so it isn't a major issue to add a handful of them to a PC port. Writing an entire rain simulation engine is an entirely different issue.

[layten]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-06-25-warner-suspends-batman-arkham-knight-pc-sales

Nvidia are offering to go in and sort this shit out.

[The Fox]

I should think so too, seeing as they've had their name plastered all over it and have been using game codes as incentivisation to buy their cards.

[JoeK]

It's gonna take ages for all this be sorted out isn't it?

[Retroguy]

I should think so too, seeing as they've had their name plastered all over it and have been using game codes as incentivisation to buy their cards.

Yep, I bet Nvidia wish they'd never used it as a poster boy for their range of cards.

The Giant Bomb article makes for depressing reading though, and makes it seem like it's going to take a major overhaul to get the problem resolved for anyone without an absolute beast of a PC.

[MansizeRooster]

At least two dev companies are working on it now, as a priority. I'd say they'll start rolling out patches inside a week.

[NecroMorrius]

I've bought the ps4 version on a whim at lunch. Time to see what these missing effects look like! I always double dip on batman, didn't expect to do it this time though. I'm a bit afraid my performance will suddenly tank or I'm missing out somehow. Will be interesting to compare the two.

[Rev]

My performance (7950, 3GB RAM, 1680x1050) is extremely patchy. It's essentially playable as the Real Gameplay bits are largely unaffected as the stealth-picking-people-off bits are all loaded into RAM fine and it's a smooth 30FPS (hm) then. It's hilariously bad at times though, Batmobile bits like everyone but I've managed to get it down to (as someone quipped) seconds per frame spinning the camera around at a high point on the map. It's literally like watching a GIF fail to load.

As much as I don't really mind since it was cheap and I think it will get fixed at some point, if cdkeys offer a refund (certain that they won't) I will take it. Performance issues are embarrassingly bad, but it's really not helped by the fact the game seems fairly shit in the first two or three hours.

[Uzi]

In that link confirms retail copies are being pulled from shelves too. Happy all of this has happened to set a precedent that you can't do this and just get away with it. Steam and other vendors must have really put the pressure on wb

[Rev]

In that link confirms retail copies are being pulled from shelves too. Happy all of this has happened to set a precedent that you can't do this and just get away with it. Steam and other vendors must have really put the pressure on wb

Pre-orders and first couple of day sales are going to be the vast majority of legitimate PC sales, until a reduction. It's good it's happening, but it's not that consequential.

Plus the physical copies don't actually have the game on them anyway. Which is nice.

[Nespresso]

This is the universe telling me to not pre-order ever again. I mean the last time I pre-ordered a game was ages ago. Can't even remember when or which game.

Anyway what a cluster-fuck. Really wish I could get my money back through CDkeys now.

[Rev]

They've said on Facebook they'll inform customers shortly. Pretty sure they'll say no though, they're not a company you go to for customer service.

[PaB]

Sometimes , an event happens and you think "thats the hall of shame winner right there" 'cos you know it won't be topped.

You PC lads are a uppity lot, but you don't deserve this

[Uzi]

Pre-orders and first couple of day sales are going to be the vast majority of legitimate PC sales, until a reduction. It's good it's happening, but it's not that consequential.

Plus the physical copies don't actually have the game on them anyway. Which is nice.

Not that consequential? It's had a digital and even physical removal of sales a few days after release and got a graphics card manufacturer come in to try and sort it out. That doesn't happen everyday. Normally you just moan and wait for a patch. It was the vocal protest against this and likely refund pressure from steam and gmg

[deerokus]

It will be interesting to see what the granddaddy of shitetacular PC ports does with its big releases this year - Ubisoft might actually have to make an effort to avoid this happening to them.

PC Far Cry 4 was in as bad a state as this from what I saw, but there was no Steam refund policy then.

[decider]

Yeah the pressure is almost certainly higher this time around and it's likely down to refunds. Just compare it with the port of MKX that WB shat out a couple of months ago before they were a thing, and that was arguably MORE broken than Batman.