Batman: Arkham Knight System Requirements

I played a bit tonight. 1080p, all normal settings max, all Nvidia Gameworks features of. It ran really well, +60 fps.
I suspect the dynamic fog and lightshafts in Nvidia Gameworks are the real killers.

 

I love how nVidia GameWorks is making nVidia look so bad...

 

You Mean all GameWorks Off, right?

 

No i meant Gameworks of, but I forgot to add Hell.

 

Just snuck in another hour of play, still no big issues for me... framerate is steady (I lock my games at 45fps using NVidia Inspector), tight controls. It's no where near as bad as the Steam forums would have you believe. Hopefully those with game breaking bugs get a quick fix.

This game is screwed on Metacritic though.... 1.6 ouch

 

We have similar specs. Are you playing with GameWorks on?

 

Close, but it's both the interactive smoke/fog and paper debris that are killers.
I don't know how reliable the in-game benchmark is (given all that has happened just recently), but I ran it multiple times, testing each Gameworks features and both the enhanced rain and lights together in a run with my current laptop setup (i7-5500u + GTX 960). Textures normal, and the others on high. No AA or V-Sync. 1080p.

Settings Min Avg Max
No Gameworks 40 54 77
With Smoke 27 40 60
With Debris 31 42 60
"Better" Rain 39 54 76
Better Light 38 52 76
Better Rain and Light 39 52 76​

I suppose in actual gameplay, the enhanced lights will be worse.
(I don't think the enhanced rain is worth turning on. Just looks like more rain.)

 

This is gameplay with my ZM, GameWorks off (no fps-counter). It´s part of my playthrough so it´s quite long with full intro.

Funny story, I immediately got slapped with a copyright claim because the intro plays "I got you under my skin". The video is now blocked in 8 countries.

 

The fact that full screen doesn't work at all is a big game breaker, period, and totally inexcusable especially for a big budget AAA $60 game. Windowed mode is a crutch and no reason other than absolutely piss poor quality control that full screen does not work. It's not drivers, it's the game, plain and simple. I, too can get it running, but there's other stutters and bugs that ruin the experience so far too.

This game may be the straw that broke the camel's back. Such a low score for such a highly anticipated titled, and with Steam refunds available now, which I hope users who purchased through Steam take advantage of en masse, this may finally send a message to devs that we are tired of this crap. But probably not. Next big release will probably just do the same... and blame it on piracy...

LOL Just rubbing salt in the would. YouTube's (c) policy is so inane. Gameplay videos should be exempt from any music policies. I get them frequently too, which is why a lot of times I turn off audio altogether, they keep getting flagged for stupid crap. I don't have the time or energy to fight them. I don't even monetize anything.

 

Wow that was badass. Game looks fun. I'll have to pick that up when a steam sale comes along at some point.

I did like how with the conversation on the roof with Gordon that he said Barbara got out of the city. I hope that's a little hint that the next series is going to be Batgirl.

 

1080p, gameworks off (haven't even tried them yet), everything else all the way up, framerate limit set to 45 instead of original 30. Might run faster, not sure, but I limit most new games to 45 just to keep things smooth and keep things a bit cooler/quieter than unlimited.

I'm by no means making excuses, but simply stating that it isn't totally broken across the board for everyone... game should never have been released with such obvious bugs. Warner Brothers/Rocksteady completely s**t the bed, but it's no where near a 1.5 Metacritic game; that's just people going over the top to prove a point. While that may be valid protest option, it's not an actual indication of the full game experience. I've played 2.5 hours today, framerate is steady, no graphical glitches, and it's simply fun to play. I am loving the new Batmobile mechanics, especially battle mode. It's still got the great fighting mechanics, gliding and grappling from roof to roof is fun and feels right. There's still a lot to like here. Warner Brothers just screwed up getting it all together.

Project Cars, Dirt Rally, GTA V, and Witcher 3 all had funky glitches and full screen issues for me at launch, so I don't know what's going on but it's sure not just this game. Those games for the most part got better with a few patches, and this will be the same I'm sure. I still can't get Dirt Rally to run in anything but a small window to this day, totally broken. Granted, it's early access, but still, game is more broken than AK and Codemasters simply says sorry, go talk to Nvidia.

Guess all I'm saying is they all suck, across the board, and probably always have and always will. Pick the games you like and tinker a bit to get them working. Other option is simply go find another hobby. I remember back in the 80's/90's I'd almost always have to load a dedicated boot disk with special mem settings etc just to get a new game running and it was still a crap shoot.

 

I've played for just under 3hrs and so far so good. I get full screen 3440x1440, I get around 45 fps, I played around with ini file. The only glitch so far is the bat mobile stutters while racing around city.
Question How do I get the Steam skin Batman Beyond, and Harley Quinn story, that I'm supposed to get for pre ordering the game.

 

hoping for a patch soon or maybe i'll just have to succumb to the PS4 version.

 

Ok, the game has issues with Optimus it seems. Appears to run OK with the 980m with no Optimus, both using the latest 353.30 "Batman Arkham Knight optimized drivers". Just a bummer that you have to run windowed mode.

 

Yeah, this game is such a terrible mess. It does better with SLI enabled, but the framerate is so low that it makes me so mad that I cannot bear the thought of trying to play it. With SLI enabled, the frame rate is still too low, much better than single GPU, but the flickering is enough to make me dizzy.

I think this might be the worst example of a botched AAA title I have ever seen before. I cannot remember a game this messed up. I'm so glad I paid under $25 for it. I'm sure it will get fixed, but c'mon Rocksteady... releasing it like this is a massive display of incompetence. Should have delayed it until it was working right.

If your heart is set on playing this turd game now instead of waiting for it to get fix, I did some tweaking and here's what helped a ton:

Use NVIDIA Inspector, delete the Arkham Knight Profile. Select the Unreal Engine 3 profile and browse to the game EXE. This allowed me to get an average of 60-65 FPS with both 780M SLI and 980M SLI and SLI works. Getting +90% GPU utilization from both GPUs. Turn off all of the eye candy crap in the game and that solved my flickering on both machines. I also edited all of the INI files with frame rate smoothing... changed all to FALSE and set minimum at 60 and maximum at 320 FPS.

Until Rocksteady fixes this abortion, this is the only way I can play it without getting in a bad mood about what a terrible mess they made of this. Seeing how NVIDIA cannot seem to do any right lately, they are probably at least partially to blame for how screwed up it is. Although, from the plethora of negative press all over the web, it seems to be a tragically horrible experience for AMD gamers as well.

Edit: another tweak... if you use on-screen display religiously as I do, if that is broken disable the "interactive" options under NVIDIA Crapworks in-game. That brought back my OSD overlay.

I have not run into that problem yet. I'm running full screen. What's really strange is my M18xR2 with 780M SLI running my 345.20 desktop driver mod and the above tweak plays better and runs faster than 980M SLI on my P570WM using the 353.30 drivers and the same tweak. When I end the game with 980M SLI I also get an "APPCRASH" error, which I do not with 780M SLI.

 

God it breaks OSD too?

Alright that's it... I'm gonna have a shot of vodka and suck it up and see what's up...

 

Yup, NVIDIA Crapworks is a real "game changer" and not in a good way.

I am going to go back to my 345.20 driver mod on the P570WM and see if 980M SLI will work better the same as 780M SLI does with that driver.

 

That's lovely... What's the point of preloading a game if it is going to re-download the whole thing again after giving you a game is still encrypted error? Wow.. Already not impressed. I know that's Steam but seriously Comcast is going to kill me. I hit 750GB last month and I'm over 600 this month... So I'll let you all know in an hour after I've gotten to play for 30 minutes if it's garbage or not.

 

I Preordered from Steam but I'm one of the lucky ones. After getting rid of that dumb 30 fps frame cap nonsense, I set the limit to 120 fps and have smooth performance. I hardly get any slow downs, even when driving and it plays as smooth as Arkham City on the highest settings it can go to.

My OSD stopped displaying though. I checked fps in the graph after exiting the game and it stays around 120 most of the time without major drops or pauses. Ive played for a few hours in total and haven't had any crashes. Specs in sig (playing on my mini ITX).

 

Turn off the NVIDIA Crapworks Interactive smog/paper garbage under graphic options and it should bring your OSD. It did for me on 780M SLI. Enabling those options did not affect OSD with 980M SLI for some reason, but I am getting higher frame rate with 780M SLI than I am with 980M SLI.

 

So... First impression... Game loads really fast... Knowing full well that I didn't have SLI because I don't have a profile I did the benchmark with everything maxed.

29 min, 43 average. I'm installing the 353.30 or whatever it is right now... What's interesting is that my Afterburner OSD did not show up but FRAPS does and I've noticed with other games that unlike a direct HWiNFO64 setup, there's some sort of detection that Afterburner uses because the OSD doesn't pop up until whatever game engine has loaded. I'm too lazy to set that up so I'm going to use GPU-Z to record data and do a FRAPS benchmark throughout.

 

So....... Game still isn't using SLI even with the new drivers and a reboot... Going into the nVidia control panel just to make sure SLI was enabled caused the game to crash when I loaded it... Back after a clean install... DDU to the rescue.......

As you can see... the second GPU wasn't being used at all...

 

So here's the messed up thing... Changing the SLI profile as Mr. Fox suggested... Min 31, max 70, average 47... But it's still only using one card.

Here's the deal... Game looks incredible... After the SLI change... and its actually relatively smooth even with all options on including all Gameworks options (except vsync which caused tearing on my TV)

However, as you can see here, there is no SLI.



Now that's the first part of the game all the way until he gets the Bat Mobile... This is UE3, we should be looking at 95+% - someone intentionally crippled this game. End of story. Not to mention lack of SLI.

As for FRAPS...

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
76414, 1056250, 21, 167, 72.345

I would have to reinstall the drivers to get back the original profile since I was stupid and didn't save it...

So its playable... but it could be much more playable with both cards. And actually putting a load on them... My cards are also +100/+100 core/mem... but I noticed a lot of stuttering especially when you get to Batman overlooking the city. If you "fix" it with the UE3 optimization that @Mr. Fox suggested, performance about doubles despite SLI just not doing anything. I firmly believe if I turned on adaptive vsync, there would be little stutter despite the Gameworks options being turned on... and I have no fullscreen issues but I also don't have an Optimus machine.

I won't be playing any further because I haven't played the others yet, I just bought them on a 75% off sale on Bundle Stars the other day, so I don't want more spoilers... but I will tell you that opening... scared the crap out of me... If you aren't playing with an Xbox controller or a PS controller with MIJ or another DS3/DS4 tool, you're missing out on a big part of the experience. When I went to dude with the cigarette I almost had an anxiety attack because the rumble and the outcome of that scene shook me so much... literally...

Anyway... For whatever reason, the stock profile is broken beyond repair and the workaround that Mr. Fox suggested about doubles stock performance... even though its not using the second card... draw your own conclusions...

The most interesting thing... is that in all my testing... its keeping the second card active... just isn't using it... this is forced behavior... I have Prema's vbios but that doesn't affect anything because unlike svl7's vbios, it doesn't force clocks unless its in a specific state. The fact it kept the slave at 955 the entire time yet didn't use it for anything is a big red flag for more misbehavior...

For those that are interested, this is the benchmark AFTER I DDU'd... Which does show usage of the second card... its actually using the card (which proves that the "clean install" option in the installer is not good enough) but the performance difference wasn't enough... The fact is, the game doesn't perform well with its stock SLI profile. Even when its somewhat using the second card...



For the sake of comparison... this is the Bioshock Infinite benchmark with the cards trimmed to their proper time the benchmark was actually running... note the linearity. Unfortunately UE3 is old (which is why it makes no sense for AK to run so slow) but you can see the scaling is well in line.



This is AK... No system changes, no reboot, same drivers... I actually had to cut based on time because the second card is being kept at the exact same clock from initialization...



Now to really drive the point home... Here's Bioshock Infinite with SLI disabled in nVidia control panel for the app...



Notice how it clocks up like it did in AK... but then drops down? AK is still using the card... You'll notice that usage drops off the chart at the end when it clocks down... because its not being fed anything. I synced the times between cards to illustrate that point.

Look at AK with SLI disabled...

Spoiler

It looks misleading... look at the lowest core clock on the graph...

So draw your conclusions... but this game is intentionally crippled...

 

anyone wanna throw out an estimated average fps for this game maxed out with the 780m or 880m?

 

If you just run it they way they released it, and using NVIDIA's recommended drivers, you can expect about a 25 to 35 FPS crap-o-rama, along with severe flashing and flickering. If you do the tweaks I mentioned back a page or two and @Ethrem validated, about twice that much, somewhat erratic, with only one of the two GPUs being effectively utilized. The "Game Ready" turd driver and NVIDIA's fancy new Arkham Knight SLI profile is about as worthless as the mammary glands on a boar and I get equal or better results on 780M SLI and 980M SLI running my 345.20 desktop driver mod with those tweaks than I do running their recommended garbage with the same exact tweaks. The equally weird part is my M18xR2 with 780M SLI performs slightly better than the P570WM with 980M SLI, so you know Rocksteady Studios really dropped the ball. It's a real mess, to put it lightly. Hopefully, they will get some patches out that fix things up in the next day or two.

 

Oh I updated that post @Mr. Fox - check it out... will blow your mind... blew mine... I didn't expect that result at all comparing two UE3 games against each other...

Oh I forgot to mention... disabling game SLI bumped my max by 3FPS and my min 2 and my average by 2... So really if you have an SLI system, the best performance is disabling SLI for that app in the NVCP.

 

Until they fix this mess, or I have more time to tweak it, this is the best I can get from this pile of dog dukey. This is with 780M SLI. It's crashing too much with 980M SLI for me to burn any calories on it. I deleted the installation and re-downloading it to see if that helps with 980M SLI. Rocksteady has been pretty decent in the past, so hopefully they will fix it in short order.

Edit: if you use the NVIDIA Inspector file, be sure to delete NVIDIA's messed up game profile for Arkham Knight within Inspector. You might want to export/save it before deleting it and importing the attached.

Code:

2015-06-24 01:24:11 - BatmanAK In-Game Benchmark
Frames: 5335 - Time: 93943ms - Avg: 56.790 - Min: 24 - Max: 79

 

This worked. Cheers.

I can't believe I'm going to have to change desktop resolution every time I want to play this game.

So this is the direction AAA games are heading in for Optimus? Completely unable to enter true fullscreen mode and with borked borderless windowed modes.

At least now I can play and see how out performs without it being locked to rendering in 4K.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

Ummm... Don't try the new 35x drivers on Windows 10... Wow if this is what nVidia comes up with now... I'm sticking with 8.1... What a mess...

I don't even know what to say... I'm going to reboot to 8.1 and make sure Gameworks didn't shut itself off.. Because Yeah... 25FPS average in 10... After I got it to not crash anyway... But I haven't run inspector yet.

But my monster hunter online dropped big time too... Trying inspector now... But wow...

 

Back when I was still optimistic that Windows 10 might be a worthy successor to Windows 7, before I stopped wasting my time with the Windoze OS X Technical Preview, I ran a number of benchmarks comparing them. I had the M18xR2 set up as triple-boot for a few months. In every benchmark test Windows 7 was better than Windows 8.1 and Windows 8.1 was better than Windoze OS X. It was progressively worse, but the gap between 7 and 10 was ranged from 5 to 15% decrease in performance, especially where physics performance was concerned. After trying the first three or so builds and seeing no evidence of improvement, I just blew it off. Sad to see it hasn't gotten any better. Almost sounds like it might be worse, which might make sense if the current flavor of the Redmond Kool-Aid has drifted further away from being like Windows 7 than it ever has been.

Wonder what we did to make Micro$haft, Intel and NVIDIA hate performance enthusiasts so much? Not a pretty picture lately.

 

I´ve read complaints about this. Supposedly some pre-order bonuses got withdrawn just hours before release.
Really ****ty if true, might wanna look into that.

 

It just showed up on my system, not quite 24 hours after installing the pre-load. It wasn't there before, so it must have updated in the background.

 

Let's put it this way... I found out that nVidia ignores overclocking on 10...again... I can set whatever I want in AB and it has no effect. 1126 max core... Okay, fine, let me see the difference...

15 37 24 in Win 10 WITH the UE3 mod
29 70 47 in 8.1 with the UE3 mod.

That's almost half a performance decrease. I exported the AK profile from W10...

W10 driver profile imported into Inspector after removing the AK entry from being marked as UE3

30 73 48

Whats ironic is that profile has no SLI tags...

I'm going to DDU and do a stock 350.12 since we know SLI is useless anyway and be right back... So far the imported W10 profile is actually the best performing so it seems Microsoft has work to do under the hood yet...

IF you bought the game through nVidia you were switched to regular retail and don't get the pre-order bonuses.

 

I'm going to have to run this again... This is a REALLY REALLY REALLY noticeable performance difference...

41 80 59

That's stock no UE3... I just rebooted to enable SLI... Let's see if that changes...

And that's without my overclock... Since I was comparing against W10 I shut it off.

27 68 45... That's a 14FPS average hit... Let me see if disabling it in NVCP makes a difference or if it has to be reboot disabled..

Crap... Forgot that NVCP won't let you make changes in 350.12...

Gonna try Fox's mod...

 

Haha, see what WB is telling people about the performance issues: http://steamcommunity.com//games/208650/announcements/detail/145587678164818505

Telling us to check our systems for minimum specs, telling us to enable page file, telling us to use an SSD since it improves streaming... we're not dumb you know. That's not the crux of the issue, duh.

In any case, running 345.20 vs 353.30 on Win 8.1 benchmark results for 980m resulted in about a 7FPS improvement, averaging about 70FPS vs 77FPS. But the benchmark isn't real indicative of actual game performance.

 

No but it's a constant scene which gives us some indication of the best driver to use. I'm pissed about the faux SLI. The W10 game ready driver doesn't even have it... And I checked and it says AK on there...

About to test the mod. Did the whole windows key, settings, recovery, etc... Just to realize I didn't DDU so it's taking me longer

 

You know... For my system, its been 350.12 all along that runs best.

350.12 - 41 80 59
Fox mod 340 - 36 72 53

Im running it again. It starts out really string but the smoke kills the 340...

39 71 53
40 72 54

GW off - 50 93 65 with a really noticeable crash in quality... I mean if you have a 17 inch screen you might not notice so much but I'm maybe 3 feet from a 55"... Its noticeable.

 

I almost just spit beer...

SLI off... Stock DDU'd 350.12

41 85 60
41 86 60
40 83 60

All GW effects on... Think I found my driver... Let's see what sli does out of curiosity and my inability to sleep with hiccups I can't get rid of...

Oh yeah just to see... +100/+100 @ stock volts - 45 87 63

 

I don't know what happened here... SLI should have no effect without a profile right?

After SLI - 28 68 45

Since 350.12 doesn't allow changing of permission I'm going to try 350.86... Because I refuse to reboot every time I want to play a game since EVERY other game I have either scales well or doesn't need SLI.

40 80 59 with a very noticeable drop when the Batmobile came in with the car but then it did 40 79 59 with no stutter the second time. That's 352.86

Now here's the problem. Ever since I imported the W10 AK profile... Its always there... Even after a clean install with DDU...

How does it have an SLI profile... When I've cleaned everything? I've deleted it and not saved, I've deleted and saved... Doesn't matter, it is always there.

 

This the first time I see comparisons where PC is actually worse than consoles :/
PC settings unknown though. Could be on the lowest possible, in which case it´s not unreasonable for PS4 to look slightly better?

Spoiler: PC vs PS4

 

Well if you have anything less than a 970, you can't run Gameworks... This was a really intentional cripple... If you look at all the data I posted... Even having SLI on a driver version that gets zero from it... Kills at least 20%

 

Sorry for the stacking but you *know* a developer is crippling the PC when you factor in that they run the same architecture, PC has more overall RAM (with 8GB GDDR5 since the 880M which was their main complaint previously with the UMA garbage), vastly superior graphics... Its all a bunch of crap to make excuses for trying to drive sales to consoles. Look how bad Watch Dogs was... Look at it now.... The bottom line is we are their least profitable segment. I mean I got my copy for 26 bucks. Where could you find the PS4 or Xbox for that? Nowhere. Why? They're price fixing and getting away with it.

 

OK so now that I've been able to actually try out the game at anything other than 4K, performance is... OK I guess - if you don't mind 30fps.

It'll run anywhere between 60 and 30 - jumping up and down all over the place - but crucially never going below 30. So I'll probably re-enable that FPS cap for a consistent locked 30fps (better than jumps from 60 down to 50, 40, 30 etc.).

This is at 1080p, all settings maxed out (including GameWorks).

For those looking for a consistent 60fps this game will not provide that.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

I already tried that and even with all of the Nvidia stuff disabled the OSD still does not show. I think it happened after I changed the ini to remove the frame rate cap but I could be wrong.

Edit:

After disabling Failworks, it does a restart but that is not enough to get the OSD back, I had to do a complete exit of the game and now my OSD works. Now I will be able to see what sort of frames I get but it is definitely consistent.

 

Turn off Gameworks and watch that fps fly.

 

Worthless "help" from Rocksteady... http://steamcommunity.com/games/208650/announcements/detail/145587678164818505

 

I wonder if that's why my performance is smooth and consistent. To those who get decent performance, particularly no stuttering, what sort of hard drive do you use?

 

Nah, that's not it. They are just making excuses to try to stop hemorrhaging and minimize their damage from looking like such a massive failure. Think about it... for those with machines exceeding "Ultra" hardware requirements: turn off advanced graphics features and buy an SSD specifically for this game if you don't already have one. Seriously?

The causes are clear. They are primarily technical incompetence, lack of regard for customer experience and greed. They knew it was a piece of crap for PC and released it anyway. Seems like they should be partners with the OEMS selling junky BGA jokebooks and trying to pass them off as "high performance" notebooks, because their low product quality standards and questionable business practices are very similar.

Batman Arkham Knight – Denuvo DRM Could be the Culprit Behind the Performance Issues on PC
Read more: http://wccftech.com/batman-arkham-knight-denuvo-drm-culprit-performance-issues-pc/#ixzz3dzh61JCJ

 

There's no need to disable gameworks. just edit BatmanAK.exe.cfg profile C:\Program Files (x86)\RivaTuner Statistics Server\Profiles

[RendererDirect3D10]
Enable=0

Code:

Load=
[RendererDirect3D8]
Implementation=1
[RendererDirect3D9]
Implementation=1
[RendererDirect3D10]
Enable=0
[RendererDirect3D11]
Implementation=1
[RendererOpenGL]
Implementation=1
[Info]
Timestamp=24-06-2015, 09:46:50

 

Will see what difference that makes. Also will try setting PhysX to only use GPU in the NV CP to make sure it's not defaulting to CPU. I also want to see what the GPU utilisation is like. It should be near 100%.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk