When Warner Bros. decided to start telling Batman: Arkham Knight on PC again, you might have thought this disastrous story was finally over. Not quite, as it turns out. Despite months of patches, the game still has significant problems.
First up, remember how older user reviews were being branded as “pre-release?” That changed overnight, and the label was mysteriously removed.
The new problems can be tough to diagnose. Different PCs will respond differently to patches. Kotaku‘s Luke Plunkett, for example, was always able to run the game fine, even before Warner Bros. took the game down from Steam.
What we do know is that anyone playing on Windows 10 now needs more RAM.
For Windows 10 users, we’ve found that having at least 12GB of system RAM on a PC allows the game to operate without paging and provides a smoother gameplay experience.
For whatever reason, the game requires a whopping 12GB of RAM to run smoothly on Microsoft’s latest operating system. The game’s minimum system requirements, by the way, are 6GB of RAM, while the recommended is 8GB.
But maybe you just need to buck up and buy more RAM, dude.
Yes, RAM is cheap. Yes, more RAM helps. No, that doesn’t make this OK.
Even if you’re on Windows 7, there are issues, if you, uh, play for too long.
After extensive testing, a hard drive paging issue with some GPUs on Windows 7 may occur after extended gameplay sessions. If you encounter this, simply re-launching the game will resolve the issue.
When in doubt, turn it off and on again.
And if you happen to be a hardcore PC player wanting to take advantage of SLI?
We are still working with our GPU partners to add full support for SLI and Crossfire. In addition, we are working with these partners to address stability issues on certain cards related to the latest drivers.
My time with the game suggested a higher overall frame rate, but one that still wildly fluctuates between 60 frames-per-second and 30 FPS. When I enter the Batmobile, the frame rate tanks. Previously, it would drop as low as 14 or 15 FPS, now it’s in the high 20s and low 30s. That’s an improvement, but it’s way lower than what I’m getting out of other high-powered PC games like The Witcher 3.
(Granted, Arkham Knight is a seriously demanding game, but still.)
PC Gamer, for example, has a similar setup to my own PC and saw few problems.
I seem to be one of the lucky ones, though. I’ve just finished reviewing it for PC Gamer — you can read it here — and I had no problems, bar a few sporadic frame-rate drops when the screen got really busy. This was on a PC with a 4GB GTX 970, an i7-950 CPU clocked at 3.0GHz, 16GB of RAM, and Windows 10.
I played 25 hours at 1080p with everything but the NVIDIA GameWorks settings maxed out, and it maintained a steady 60fps throughout. Compared to my first attempt to play the game when it was first released, it’s a massive improvement. But everyone’s setup is different, and others are finding the game unplayable.
It was less promising at Rock Paper Shotgun, though.
That said, the new version of Arkham Knight is not exactly a revelatory experience on my PC. I’ve got a Windows 10 system running a GTX 970, a 4GHz i7 and 8GB RAM, and oh boy, the stuttering is no fun. I wouldn’t actually call it deal-breaking, but it is extremely distracting, and the new graphical options sadly haven’t reinstated enough eye-pleasing goodness to take the sting away. I’m not about to go out and drop £30-odd on upgrading as I will see quite literally zero benefit from it in anything else I use my PC for, and frankly I’m finding this particular game increasingly tedious anyway.
In any case, 12GB (and the restart advice in Windows 7) simply doesn’t seem like a reasonable ask: no other game needs it, the stuttering/paging issue doesn’t exist in the console versions of the game, and those boxes certainly don’t have 12GB. (However, it must be said that Xbone and PS4 use RAM in a very different way to PCs, especially as they don’t have a honking great version of Windows chewing up a portion of it).
This video, comparing the frame rates between the two versions, accurately reflects what it’s been like when I play the game — good but not great.
Some players can’t even get the game to boot anymore.
Warner Bros. is currently soliciting feedback for the patch, which has resulted in a 63-page thread on Steam that’s not exactly full of happy, satisfied customers.
It’s unclear when Warner Bros. might deliver another patch to the PC version of Arkham Knight, but at some point, it will be too little, too late. Maybe it already is.
Comments
33 responses to “Batman: Arkham Knight’s PC Version Is Far From ‘Fixed’”
Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry found the improvements to be so null that they haven’t even written a full article about it.
From the article: “Batman: Arkham Knight PC still broken, players say
“At least 12GB” RAM now recommended on Windows 10.”
UPDATE: For those reading after original article, they have a follow up now and it’s the same thing really.
Oh holy shit…
…
16gb ram here and it still runs meh.
PC Masterace For The Wi…. wait a sec.
16GB+ ram master race
Sucks to be you if you are for some reason running a 32 bit OS.
Or the brand new Windows 10…
The windows 10 that supports up to 512GB of RAM? Why would that suck?
“For whatever reason, the game requires a whopping 12GB of RAM to run smoothly on Microsoft’s latest operating system. The game’s minimum system requirements, by the way, are 6GB of RAM, while the recommended is 8GB.”
“16GB+ ram master race”
a few botched games doesnt spoil a platform. console would be fucked otherwise.
Yer it means nothing if the developers don’t support it. For example with the witcher 3 ive been enjoying a flawless 60fps on ultra settings for the last 3 months.
People told me I was stupid for going with 32gb of ram saying it was a waste of money well who’s stupid now?!
My PC has 32GB of RAM (around 5 years old btw)…I still wouldn’t want to play a game with a massive memory leak like that.
Sounds like a piece of smoking garbage that’s been pushed out to meet a strict deadline rather than delaying to ensure quality.
5kg of banana.
That’s a big banana!
So about $120?
I can attest to all of this. Even with all the “patching” that’s been done, the performance is shockingly bad at any setting above Normal detail at 1080p. At those settings I get 98% 60fps, with the occasional minor drops and hitches. Problem is, I have a UHD monitor and so playing at anything less than 1440p looks absolutely awful. At 1440p on the same settings however, the framerate constantly fluctuates between 30-60fps. 4K isn’t even worth talking about. This is on a system with 16Gb of 2133Mhz RAM, 2 780Tis and an i7 4790K CPU.
Compare this with Mad Max, which I was able to run at 4K, ultra detail at 60fps constantly, with only very occasional drops to 54-56fps whenever there were a lot of particle effects on screen. Avalanche are masters at PC porting, whereas Iron Galaxy and Rocksteady are just colossal f*ck ups if Arkham Knight is anything to go by.
Game is just beyond repair.
G̶a̶m̶e̶ Developer reputation is just beyond repair.
Sounds like they aren’t even trying to fix it. Now I’m a PS4 gamer I feel less invested in this story, but it still irks me to hear about developers like these who clearly don’t take the PC platform seriously at all.
Even though I’m playing on PS4 (which I assume has minimal or no issues), and even though I’ve player Asylum and City to death, I will NOT be picking this game up ever. I’ll be staying away from future Warner Bros. Games too as they have a track record for this kind of thing.
Yeah, I don’t have the game and if I do get it it’ll be on PS4 anyway, where it is apparently quite good. But the simple fact is that they should do it properly or not do it at all.
This is why i cbf with pc gaming too many issues . Even with having a decent gaming PC i still encounter random issues with games. Il stick with PS4.
It’s just a shitty port. This is an example where the developer\publisher simply won’t put the time into making the port work. It’s completely unprofessional.
Just a shit port of a boring game. Actual games developed for PC rarely have issues like this.
It goes both ways – it’s just that crappy PC ports are a relatively recent phenomenon – I’ve been a console gamer for decades and bad console ports have been a thing as long as I can remember
Doom
Duke Nukem
Quake
Team Fortress 2
Counter strike GO
PayDay 2
To name just a few
PayDay 2 had a shit launch on console too, so it was just all around bad 😛
Yeah that what I was getting at – consoles have been putting up with shoddy ports of PC games for years – I remember buying The Sims on Gamecube and I couldn’t even create a save file because you needed a extra large memory card just to save your progress!
I get constant 60fps a 1440p using a 980ti. The only thing is that I can’t use sli but they’re working on it so I guess it’ll be ready by the time I’m done with fallout 4!
Runs pretty nicely for me but my PC is reasonably modern.
Still, before the patch it was looking like a PS2 game in order to run well so in future I will be waiting to see which platform a game runs the best on before I buy it.
Just Cause 3.
Just sayin’.