Batman: Arkham Knight

Rocksteady is leading our team of developers and partners as we work on the PC performance issues that players have been encountering. The work is significant and while we are making good progress on improving performance, it will take some time to ensure that we get the right fixes in place.



Below is the list of the key areas where we are dedicating our resources to improve the experience for our loyal fans:



- Support for frame rates above 30FPS in the graphics settings menu

- Fix for low resolution texture bug

- Improve overall performance and framerate hitches

- Add more options to the graphics settings menu

- Improvements to hard drive streaming and hitches

- Address full screen rendering bug on gaming laptop

- Improvements to system memory and VRAM usage

- NVIDIA SLI bug fixes

- Enabling AMD Crossfire

- NVIDIA and AMD updated drivers



While we work on improving performance, we will also continue to make interim patches available to address issues for those still playing the game on PC. The first patch is being released now and the updates include:



- Fixed a crash that was happening for some users when exiting the game

- Fixed a bug which disabled rain effects and ambient occlusion. We are actively looking into fixing other bugs to improve this further

- Corrected an issue that was causing Steam to re-download the game when verifying the integrity of the game cache through the Steam client

- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when turning off Motion Blur in BmSystemSettings.ini. A future patch will enable this in the graphics settings menu



We would like to thank our fans for their patience and invaluable feedback. We will continue to monitor and listen for any additional issues.

“I will say that it’s pretty rich for WB to act like they had no idea the game was in such a horrible state,” said one quality assurance tester who worked on the game for years. “It’s been like this for months and all the problems we see now were the exact same, unchanged, almost a year ago.”

Two sources, requesting anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their careers, spoke with Kotaku over the past week in hopes of explaining how the broken PC version of Arkham Knight made it out the door. They both said that Warner Bros. was aware of the many issues facing Arkham Knight on PC and that the publisher chose to ship the game regardless, not to maniacally screw over customers—but because they believed it was good enough.

“Getting it to work on consoles was impossible for months,” said our tester source. “That’s part of why the game got delayed so many times, they were totally unprepared for how hard it was on next-gen consoles.”

“We reported literally thousands of bugs that were specific to the PC version relating to the frame rate,” said our QA source. “All sorts of fucked up texture issues. The Batmobile in particular has always fucked things up on PC.”

One unexpected problem? The game’s secretive story. Rocksteady was deeply afraid of plot revelations being leaked ahead of release, said the same source, so traditional PC testing firms that are used to stress test games on different hardware configurations—one of the PC’s biggest hurdles—were avoided.