Batman: Arkham Knight - September 3rd Patch testing - I5 4690K & GTX 770
44Greetings, everyone.
On September 3rd, we got a patch "released" for Arkham Knight (officially on the 4th though), and supposedly this is the much expected patch that will fix most of the issues the PC version of the game had since release.
As I did in my previous video for the patch released on June, I test most of the settings in order to decide which are best to achieve playable and optimal performance on my particular system.
First off, my specs are:
-CPU: i5 4690K@4.4 GHz (Turbo).
-Mobo: Asus Maximus VII Ranger.
-GPU: Asus GTX 770 DirectCU II OC 2 GB with no extra OC.
-RAM: 16 GB DDR3@1866, 9-10-9-28.
-Storage: Kingston SSDNow 300, 240 GB where both game and O.S. are installed.
-O.S: Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64bit with latest updates.
At first glance we can already see several new additions to the graphics options menu, like adaptive vsync, 30, 60 and 90 (odd number there) FPS caps -and oddly enough, no off/uncap option- , a new texture quality option (High) which will be the main setting to tweak to gain performance, of course, the ability to disable some post effects like chromatic aberration and film grain (no impact on performance with those though) and more things that we cover in the video.
As far as performance is concerned, and compared to the previous patch, I’m not really seeing huge FPS increases or anything. If you recall from my previous video on the matter, my game already ran “decently” and I didn’t really experience most of the bad FPS issues some other users were having, though FPS were not that great anyways from what we expected.
In any case, in the video we can see that, compared to my previous experience with older patches, my frame rate is almost the same as before. But now we can have a visual indicator in the graphics options menu on how much VRAM our settings will consume. This is merely an estimate and as you can see, MSI Afterburner’s display will probably be more precise on this matter. Anyway, if we use normal or high textures, we get slight FPS drops when flying around Gotham, and honestly, the difference in texture quality compared to “low” is not that great.
When we use “low” textures, which they seem pretty similar to what “normal” used to be in the previous patch, we have some better performance, less hitching and a better gameplay experience overall. I can still play with normal textures but, as you can see in the last part of the video, driving around in the batmobile causes the FPS to drop close to the 30’s, while when using low textures they stay way above 40.
As for shadows, the other major performance hitting setting, can’t really say there’s much difference between low, normal or high, so I’d probably keep using “normal” as I used in previous patches, didn’t notice any significant changes there, honestly.
I’m not sure if this is the final patch for us PC players of Arkham Knight, but well, we can say the game has more customization options now, especially in the graphics settings, which was much needed, but at least for my system there wasn’t any major performance boost. The game is perfectly playable in its current state, though, but it still has a very high RAM usage, despite the fact the patch addressed this in some way, it’s still too high in my opinion.
Hope the video was useful to any of you still playing this game on the PC, and see you in the next one : )
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