PC Port Fail, But Here's Our Have

Arkham Knight has received enough detest that Batman would probably hang up his cape if he read /r/PCGaming.

Unfortunately, the in-game benchmark doesn't accurately reverberate gameplay afterwards all -- at least not all the gameplay. Performance slipped heavily once Batman fired upward his Batmobile in our Fraps testing.

Nosotros believe the in-game benchmark reflects how the game should perform once it's fixed, but due to poor optimization there are parts of the game that have a serious corporeality of rendering power to evangelize barely playable functioning.

Every bit advertised, Batman: Arkham Knight is extremely demanding on VRAM. If enough VRAM is bachelor, the game volition employ around 4.2GB/s at just 1080p, 5GB at 1440p and a little over 6GB at 4K. This is what nosotros believe is causing and then many performance issues for those running lower-end hardware. The averages appear playable but the demand for more VRAM than depression-stop GPUs accept is causing extreme stuttering.

Arkham Knight's biggest issue may non be how enervating/poorly optimized the game is in certain areas, just rather its lack of tweakable options and thus poor hardware scaling. The heavy utilise of GameWorks is another big trouble and it seems whatsoever game Nvidia touches at the moment ends up running similar garbage.

The interactive fume/fog and paper droppings admittedly murders operation on Nvidia GPUs -- even the most high-end models. Gamers have uploaded videos to YouTube using graphics cards such equally the GTX 970 with these PhysX based features enabled showing poor performance and only put, these features should not be enabled on a unmarried-GPU setup.

The enhanced pelting and light shafts reduced performance by 20% when using both the R9 390X and GTX 980 while disabling all GameWorks features immune the GTX 770 and R9 280X to deliver perfectly playable performance at 1440p even in our custom Fraps criterion.

Interestingly, when testing with Fraps, playing at 1080p and 1440p delivered virtually the aforementioned results which wasn't the case when using the congenital-in benchmark. With that beingness the case, nosotros aren't shocked to hear that folks running at 1080p aren't receiving the expected performance.

We must emphasize again that you should exist using the latest display drivers, peculiarly for an AMD carte du jour. The Catalyst 15.six beta driver actually helps with performance whereas the previous version makes for unplayable results when trying to drive the Batmobile.

Using the built-in criterion we began testing at 1080p where the R9 290 struck us as beingness the best value option for high-end operation. It tin be had for around $250 and gamers can expect R9 390X- and GTX 980-like performance at 1080p.

The erstwhile HD 7970 and GTX 680 performed reasonable well at this resolution, though sadly the new R9 380 ran into trouble and I don't remember nosotros can blame the 2GB memory buffer since the GTX 680 and GTX 770 didn't suffer from the same massive drop in minimum frame rate.

To make sure, w e ran t he R9 380 and R9 285 tests more than half a dozen times. The lower-end AMD GPUs with ju st 2GB of VRAM had lower-than-expected minimum frame rates at 1080p, whereas the Nvidia GPUs such as the GTX 660 Ti and GTX 760 didn't endure as much .

Those wanting to play at 1440p volition require at to the lowest degree a GTX 780 from Nvidia or the R9 290 from AMD. Over again the R9 290 appeared to exist the sugariness spot in terms of price vs. performance, though this time the R9 390 provided a healthier minimum frame rate.

As is typically the case, 4K gaming is left to the titans, or in this case the GTX 980 Ti until the Fury X deals some real contest.

Despite AMD warning of possible crashes when running the in-game benchmark with the latest beta commuter, nosotros are happy to study that nosotros didn't encounter a single crash after testing a dozen Radeon GPUs. In fact, besides the strange frame rate drops with the R9 380 and R9 285, everything was fine on AMD'south finish.

For optimum performance gamers are still forced to cull a processor from Intel's Cadre range. Information technology would exist nice to accept some variety but we were withal impressed with how well Intel'south Core i3-4360 performed.

Although Arkham Knight is probably worth playing for fans of the franchise, information technology seems smart to hold out for patches and discounts if yous haven't already spend the $60 at launch. Warner Brothers has suspended sales on PC and nosotros suspect this volition be amongst the first major releases to supply Steam with the data information technology needs to outset shaking out its new refund policy.