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Arkham Knight New Patch Optimization And Information Guide

admin
2025-01-23 10:13:14

Information, Fixes, Culprits, Testing.

Bare in mind my configuration may differ from yours but as of such use it to the best of your ability.

Rig: i5 3570K, GTX Titan Black -Watercooled, 8GB RAM. Win10

#Freezing/stuttering

In regards to the main problem that many are noticing with this patch, the issue of stuttering and freezing is more common than ever, with many suspecting a streaming issue from the HDD. Not the case, the main culprit of the majority of frame drops, stuttering, and freezing

come from two places. The first is that whatever engine the game is using, is clearly not playing nicely with Nvidia's Gameworks library. This library is a simple plug-in tool for developers. How well they optimize it is down to them, but many reports criticize this library as a blackbox; meaning devs have no real way to properly optimize it for their games, since they have no real source code from it to effectively cater towards their game engine. Drag 'n' drop.

(For more info look up Richard Huddy AMD Game Scientist & PCPerspective) An example of this that already came before Arkham Knight was The Witcher 3. Turn on Gameworks and his hair looks pretty...yeah, until you start moving, then it craws to a pitiful hult. Turn it off, the game runs fine. The same is the case with the Arkham Knight, their engine doesn't play well with Gameworks. I found that by turning off Interactive smoke/fog, and Interactive paper/debris, the game will not stutter or freeze or have random hiccups.

The scond culprit to the random freezing and stuttering is the Batmobile. There's something about the game engine that changes the method of rendering the environment, in contrast to running, flying or fighting. Switching to Tank mode changes things however, and the framerate becomes "Normal". Driving, well, that's an issue with their engine and the way it chooses to render things at high speeds.

#Framerate and resolution differences.

First off, do yourself a favour, turn off Interactive smoke/fog, and Interactive paper/debris. As said previously Gameworks and the way it interacts with the game is a problem. Gameworks is reliant upon physics simulation being injected into the game. Most noticeably is the Batmobile. Do a burnout with these two settings turned on, and watch your framerate mimmick a yo-yo. Turn it off and the game looks fine but actually becomes somewhat playable. These two effects are hammering the GPU and for no real reason whatsoever. It's The Witcher 3 and his fancy hair-do all over again. Nvidia cards may be able to render physics-based simulation but the fact of the matter is they do not do it well, and they need to stop advertising that as a reason to buy one.

Interactive rain and lightshafts don't really do much in the way of framerate differences. Leave 'em on if your GPU can handle it but their not a taxing set of effects anyway. It should be noted that all they really do is run water down Batman's cape when he's flying and bloom-out lights in the distance.That's all. Turning them off: the cape still ripples and such and rain still runs down his face and interacts with his body, and lights still look good.

#Benchmark

Running at 1080p everything maxed out, v-sync off, fps lock at 90, Motion blur off because it's a performance hog and it looks disgusting, chromatic abberation set to off because it's an error in photography NOT a special effects that looks good, Interactive smoke/fog, and Interactive paper/debris turned off, other Nvidia effects turned on, AA set to on.

First of all, the built in benchmark is the worst. At these settings mentioned or even at 1440p, the fps will hit 120 max, 90 avg, 60 min. In-game is a different story: Flying, running, fighting, you can expect to be at 60 avg, 90 max(flying), min 49. Whether I was at 1080p with AA-on, or 1440p with AA -off, there was no real difference in fps. More or less identical. Now, driving on the otherhand, the minimum 49fps basically becomes your avg. Turning the nvidia Gimpworks on with the previously mentioned settings, you can expect a deduction of 10fps for each, and jumping into the batmobile will turn your fps into a yo-yo from 39-55fps, AND the stuttering/freezing returns.

Additional info. Running at 4k everything maxed out, v-sync off, fps lock at 90, Motion blur off because it's a performance hog and it looks disgusting, chromatic abberation set to off because it's an error in photography NOT a special effect that looks good, Interactive smoke/fog, and Interactive paper/debris turned off, other Nvidia effects turned on, AA set to on or off (Made no difference) -The fps was in console peasant territory. 30 fps in otherwords. While it's 4x that of a console with additional effects and looking better, THOU SHALL NOT PLAY AT 30Hz.

#What have we learned and what can we do

Well, turn off the two mentioned Nvidia effects, keep your v-sync off as the tearing should actually be gone or reduced (mine was), keep your fps set to the 90 lock, and test with your own resolution. Good results show at 1080p-1440p regardless of set-up (that's what most people are playing at) When adjusting resolution over 1080p be sure to turn AA -off. I'm aware it's SMAA which is very good but it can in this case be a bugger when going over 1080p, which, once you're over that anyway isn't worth it. Turn off motion blur and that cheap trick that photographers despise. AMD users don't even attempt the nvidia Gimpworks. Nvida users be wary of future Nvidia Gimpworks titles. Notice how MadMax runs fine but nobody bought it because WarnerBros screwed us over with Arkham Knight and cannot be trusted? Plus, MGS5 ripped it apart in-terms of actually being a game that people can trust, coming from a good developer.

#Main problems and what the devs need to do

-Take a good, long, hard look at the batmobile and why it's screwing with the game so hard.

-Stop using Nvidia effects for future releases. THEY DO NOT WORK.

-Use benchmarks that are representive of gameplay. Not Batman brooding on a rooftop and a

bunch of morons walking down the road. Show car chases, LOTS of NPCs, weather effects, and Batman nosediving through the city.

-Tesselation. If you look through the config files at discover the batman system settings responsible for graphical settings and rendering, you'll see the tesselation measurement. This is Arkham City, Crysis 2, and The Witcher 3 all over again. They're over-tesseleating everything for no reason. Give an option to turn it down in the menu, or, just turn it down yourselves so the game is playable. A playable game is better than a game that's pretty that crumbles to it's knees outside of a screenshot.

-Fix the rest of the game outside of Nvidia's nonsense, because whether you're an AMD or Nvidia user, the game is botched either way. Why is my performance the same whether I'm at 1080p or 1440p, yet other users regardless of set-up are struggling and showing two conflicting results in-terms of how they adjust the graphical settings? There's some people on here that see no difference in performance no matter what settings they try to play at. The game's a mess.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=512018089

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