Batman Arkham Knight recently launched to excellent reviews, at least for those playing on the PlayStation 4. Reviewers were only sent this particular version, and it has become clear why the PC port of the game was kept away from reviewers. PC gamers have discovered that the game runs horribly due to issues with memory leaks and stuttering frame rates thanks to NVIDIA’s Gameworks.
The Steam store page for Arkham Knight currently lists the reviews as mostly negative, and scrolling through them reveals a multitude of gamers who feel ripped off. Many complain about frame rates dropping while gliding around Gotham; this is despite having high end graphics cards like the GTX 980.
AMD has previously accused NVIDIA of optimising games for Gameworks, and causing those games to lose performance while running on Radeon based graphics cards. Arkham Knight is no exception with AMD users reporting the worst problems. However, NVIDIA has also fallen victim to its own Gameworks engine this time around.
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Memory leaks which result in the game crashing have also been reported among users on Reddit. Some noted that memory usage would spike up to 12GB while running Arkham Knight. To be fair, this is only temporary as the game would then crash completely after a short while.
PC gamers were already wary about Arkham Knight as the developer Rocksteady Games had announced that the game would be locked to a maximum 30 fps. This has not entirely been a problem as the limit can be removed by editing the settings files, something that most PC gamers are already familiar with. Of course, this would be nice if the game could actually stay at 30 fps.
This is not the first game from Warner Bros Games to have had a poor PC port. Both Mortal Kombat X and Injustice: Gods Among Us suffer from similar performance issues, although neither has become completely unplayable. Seeing that neither MKX and Injustice have been fixed by now, it would be safe to say that it might be a better idea to stick to the PS4 for this one.
[Source: Reddit, Steam Community]
