Batman: Arkham Knight suffers from severe AMD optimisation issues

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.