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Batman: Arkham Knight October Re-Release Performance Update

Final Thoughts

It’s good to be able to bring some positive news regarding the newest Batman game, but things are still far from perfect. While the performance has increased, in some cases as much as a 100% increase, there are still underlying issues that need to be addressed and these should have been address before it was re-released. I can understand the pressure that the developers were under to get the game back out, especially in time for the holiday season, but producing a broken game twice just leaves the company open to more ridicule.

So what is good about the update? Well WB has introduced a lot more graphical settings to choose from and play with. They’re not the most advanced settings with just a Low, Med and High setting, but its better than what was originally offered. Along with this, NVIDIA GAMEWORKS was added and rightly so considering this is a NVIDIA partnered game. The fact that you can now choose to set a maximum FPS limit is good, but I only see it as placebo to the original issue of an FPS lock to around 30FPS.

Let’s talk NVIDIA, everything got better in every way. The overall performance of all of the cards was increased and the stability issues presented in the update for the GTX 950 and 960 have been resolved. However, the performance of those two cards has degraded since the original release and it is likely due to a poor patch to fix the benchmark stability, even though the benchmark ran it was extremely laggy compared to what it could have been. The rest of the range saw a nice boost and everything ran perfectly and as it should have from day one.

AMD on the other hand still has a small problem for the R9 380. I tried both a 2GB and 4GB version and both froze at exactly the same point in the benchmark suite, however they did play the campaign easy enough with only minor stutters here and there due to the high settings being enabled. The settings were lowered and the game even re-installed and the problem persisted. Thankfully, that seemed to be the only negativity with the AMD cards as performance was good from there on. The R9 390X made the most notable gain from a lowly 46FPS to a huge 105FPS.

Now I couldn’t really test the Windows 7 hard drive paging issues or the ridiculous Windows 10 12GB RAM requirement due to limitations with our test bench and accessibility to those operating systems. However, if these issues are indeed present and not a one off implication with an extremely small number of systems, expect a fix in the next five months or so.

At the end of the last Batman update article I wrote: