Set to release today, June 23rd, Batman: Arkham Knight has already impressed critics – the PS4 version has at least.
All should be well in the eyes of adoring fans of the caped crusader then, right?
Just in time for the launch, however, something rather fishy regarding the PC version of Arkham Knight has taken place.
Up until yesterday, courtesy of NVIDIA, the minimum recommended specs for Arkham Knight called for an NVIDIA GTX 660 – no mention of an AMD card was made.
Naturally, we all assumed an equivalent AMD card, like the HD 7850, would be the minimum requirement for AMD users – it seems not.
OS: Win 7 SP1, Win 8.1 (64-bit Operating System Required)
Processor: Intel Core i5-750, 2.67 GHz | AMD Phenom II X4 965, 3.4 GHz
Memory: 6 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 (2 GB Memory Minimum) | AMD Radeon HD 7950 (3 GB Memory Minimum)
DirectX: Version 11
Network: Broadband Internet connection required
Hard Drive: 45 GB available space
What you’re looking at above is the updated minimum recommended specs as of yesterday, and what you have probably noticed is the call for an AMD Radeon HD 7950.
The HD 7950 is quite a bit faster than the GTX 660, leading many to believe that Rocksteady is having issues correctly optimising Batman: Arkham Knight for AMD’s GPUs.
After the recent controversy with The Witcher 3 and NVIDIA’s HairWorks, and GameWorks in general, limiting AMD card performance, AMD fans are going to find this news tough to swallow, especially if you pre-ordered the game as the owner of an HD 7850.
We know that Arkham Knight makes use of a number of NVIDIA GameWorks technologies, so we have no doubt someone somewhere will start a fire.
NVIDIA’s GameWorks can work miracles, as you’ll see in the embedded trailer below, but it’s certainly going to have to be questioned if it’s impeding AMD performance
Keep in mind that NVIDIA may not be at fault and Rocksteady might simply be having issues with AMD’s hardware.
But that’s hard to swallow when you consider that both the PS4 as well as the Xbox One make use of AMD graphics architecture, so Rocksteady should have more than enough practice getting the PC cards up to snuff.
In related news
Batman: Arkham Knight Review Roundup
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Game manufacturing companies should start investing time to wright games for the sake of games and not for their own financial pockets to get rebates and sponsors from GPU manufactures to sell their over priced cards.
Way back when there still was honesty and real enthusiasm in games development, all games could be played by existing hardware, the game was released as a final copy (not v1.x.x.x. update v10.x.x.x) in other words, they game was playable without crashes from day one.
Game developers are more concerend over their wallets than quality of what they release. Hence the big move from hackers/crackers to crack games and make it freely available. That is the inevitable which will happen when companies get greedy and release sh*t which is half tested and completely incompatible with existing hardware. Do they really think everybody is going to buy new graphic cards to play their rehashed sh*t, sold at ridiculous prices and then to download 50gigs more from steam? Welcome hackers and crackers – the world appreciates your ingenious services and the game companies hate you! They are at the end of their money making innovations.