Hi everyone. So unfortunately Batman Arkham Knight's patch has been released and
it's basically a great big letdown. How did we know that was going to be the case?
Well, essentially because the engine is the problem here. Now essentially Warner
Brothers has taken around two months after failing miserably to launch their PC
version of the game that wasn't a trading standards offence, they have now come back
with an interim patch to fix performance. But unfortunately I don't know who they
fix performance for, but all they've really managed to do is to widen the gap on the
wandering frame rate. Now you might remember I mentioned in my videos
looking at Batman Arkham Knight's technical problems that the frame rate
is not only inconsistent but it wanders wildly up and down the scale. Anything
above 30 frames a second and it simply will not lock stabley at all. So
effectively what you have is say, a 40 frames a second presentation wandering up to 60 frames a
second, or 55 frames a second wandering down to 35. It continuously
wanders around never managing to find a stable point. Now, to contrast this we've got
something like Metal Gear Phantom Pain. A game that is also very dark, has a
stealthy element to it,
lots of bright light effects at just those right key moments. That runs beautifully solid at
60 frames per second on this rig. Likewise a game like Witcher 3
which isn't the best when it comes to frame rates, I still achieve a solid 55
frames a second. So here we have a game which has now gone through drastic patchwork to
try and get the frame rate up to what was advertised by NVIDIA, a
60 frames a second presentation and ultimately it still fails miserably. Now
part of this comes down to the way the engine itself appears to be operating.
It simply isn't capable of running above 30 frames a second without hitting large
bottlenecks. Now specifically I've noticed within the AI, when you actually get into a fight
in the street and you're bouncing around hitting these thugs, the frame rate for every thug that
hits the ground starts going up. So I should incapacitate them and knock out their
AI routines, essentially the frame rate starts to improve. Now what on earth is bottle necking
within this engine that a core i7 at 3.8 gigahertz is effectively
hitting a brick wall but also likewise when we look at the level of detail going on
within Batman, in actual fact I think it's probably a damn sight too high
really for what they were trying to do in this engine. Continuously the
framerate wanders around, as you are moving around a scene just spinning the camera let
alone driving the Batmobile it's continuously fluctuating up and down
never stable above 30 frames a second. Literally this game is not optimised to
work above 30 frames a second and I don't think whatever the game developers do
they're going to make a blind bit of difference to that. The engine is the
bottleneck here. For whatever reason it is just too resource-hungry for the
average systems out there. Now I don't think my PC is the fastest PC ever
built but it's certainly no slouch either and it's designed to eliminate
bottlenecks. It's a core i7 running at 3.8 GHz. It has 16 gig of ram clocked at 1800Hz.
We've got a Geforce 770 GPU backed up by SSD drives. There is no bottleneck
here necessarily, other than the ones the developers have ended up putting
into the engine itself. As I say, Grand Theft Auto 5, 60 frames-a-second solid.
Metal Gear Phantom Pain, 60 frames-a-second solid. Witcher 3, 55
frames-a-second solid. There is something wrong with Batman Arkham Knight on PC and
it isn't going to be fixed with patching guys. Honestly this thing is still a trading
standards offence. We were sold a game that can run at 60 frames-a-second. Heck!
If they just delivered something that was stable at 45 frames-a-second
I think I could give this game a pass because at least they would have had
something that was playable. This is not a playable game. It is a completely
unplayable cludgy mess unfortunately.
So do let me know how you're getting on with the latest Batman patch. It will be
interesting to see if your specs are giving you a better performance here.
Maybe SLI users will find this game runs much better than we're finding on single
GPUs but I doubt it, I'm afraid, because it's the engine that's bottle necking this here, not our hardware.