As part of the ongoing problematic launch of Batman: Arkham Knight, developer Rocksteady Games inexplicably updated its minimum specifications overnight, adding an AMD card to the line-up. The absence of anything other than an Nvidia recommendation had raised a few eyebrows in the run-up to the game’s launch, though considering that so many people have been having performance issues, perhaps this was Rocksteady’s way of hedging its bets.
Whether you have the newly added card or something much more powerful doesn’t seem likely to make a lot of difference, though. Along with the problems people have had with corrupted file caches — forcing them to re-download many of the game’s files — performance issues have cropped up for the full range of users, from those running low-end hardware all the way up Titan X users. The problems seem to mostly be arising from the use of the Batmobile.
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There are also reports of big frame rate drops — seemingly at random — and graphical glitches such as stuttering or textures not loading properly. And all of these issues seem independent of any GPU preference.
In hindsight, it seems likely that Rocksteady’s hasty addition of an AMD GPU to its list of specifications was its way of warning users that having a reasonably recent GPU would be helpful in running the game smoothly; even if it doesn’t in actuality seem to help.
While neither Rocksteady nor its publisher Warner Bros. have announced why the game’s specifications were changed on the eve of its release, they have both said that they are working with AMD and Nvidia to figure out what the reason is for all of the graphical hiccups in the game.
For those that don’t want to wait for a big fix, there is a new Nvidia driver out which may help — if you have a compatible GPU. Give that a try and let us know how you get on.
