After PC sales of Batman: Arkham Knight were halted due to the sheer amount of problems experienced by gamers, we finally have news regarding a patch.

And just to rub salt into the wound, a recent PC versus console comparison as well as PC benchmarks have indicated quite clearly how broken the PC port still is.

The promises for PC gamers

Firstly, Warner Bros. has promised a number of fixes to the assortment of problems in the PC version.

Here are the key areas of concern for Rocksteady in their active role to address the game:

• 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 laptops
• Improvements to system memory and VRAM usage
• NVIDIA SLI bug fixes
• Enabling AMD Crossfire
• NVIDIA and AMD updated drivers

Very little has been addressed in the first patch

The first patch for the game recently became available yesterday for PC gamers.

The patch fixed a bug which disabled rain effects and ambient occlusion. However, for many it did not improve performance, and the 30fps cap still remains.

Although it has been promised that they will eventually reach a positive status quo, we seemingly have a long way to go.

Here are the release notes for the first PC path:

• 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.

A PC versus Xbox One analysis: post patch

If you’re wondering how the PC version now compares to console versions of Batman: Arkham Knight, have a look at the video below.

The Xbox One version, providing a very similar experience to the PS4, is meant to represent the console release of the game in general.

The  PC version was run on an AMD R9 290x 1080p, with maximum settings and with the available GameWorks options enabled. Sadly, an NVIDIA card wasn’t included.

You can watch the pre-patch comparison video above, if you want to see how performance has changed overall.

The console versions are clarified

Digital Foundry released some comments on the state of the console releases of Batman: Arkham Knight.

Their comments are related to the game running in 900p on the Xbox One and in 1080p on the PS4, but there’s more to it than that.

Check out Gotham’s beautiful city-line! Image courtesy of WCCFTech.

Digital Foundry has confirmed that even though the PS4 runs Batman: Arkham Knight at Full-HD resolutions it is not necessarily the crispest experience. This is largely due to heavy post-processing like anti-aliasing as well as a film grain filter.

But the Gotham city-line is rendered beautifully in the PS4 version of the game, running at a pixel-count that is hard to believe.

There are still a couple pop-in issues, but the game looks good on PS4 and rarely shows any rough edges.

In regards to the Xbox One version, which runs at 900p, Digital Foundry said that every detail and single effect carries over from the PS4 version. So you’ll be getting largely the same experience.

Texture mapping is identical between both versions and with asset streaming only minor variances exist. Furthermore, Digital Foundry say that the experience on both Xbox One and PS4 is great.

For now it appears that the actual performance of the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight had improved somewhat, but there are still many more promises to be kept.

The console versions appear to running decently, with a few issues which should be hammered out in upcoming updates to both the PS4 and Xbox One versions.

All-in-all, thing seem to be improving for Batman: Arkham Knight.

Source: WCCFTech 1, 2, 3, 4

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