If there’s ever been a game that had a rocky launch on PC, it’s Batman: Arkham Knight. While perfectly passable console versions of the game launched in June, the PC version, which was released the same day, was more or less unplayable.
Warner Brothers has taken to its forum to announce that another interim patch for the game is here, and it addresses quite a few issues that PC players had. However, it’s important to note that this is not the final patch, and the list of the things that still need to be fixed on the game is quite long.
Issues addressed in the patch start on the performance side, with improvements to hitching across the board, optimizations for system memory and VRAM usage, improved performance on all GPUs, fixes to texture bugs at low resolution, and improvements to hitching issues for users running mechanical HDDs, which was one of the bigger issues at launch.
There’s also access to a wider range of settings. At launch, the options for the game were rather sparse, which is unacceptable for a PC game where users expect to be able to tweak the settings in order to have the game run to their preferences.
The folks over at TomsHardware did comprehensive tests on the game, and did indeed notice some small improvement overall in performance, so at least WB did deliver on making the game run more smoothly.
However, the list of things that still need to be done is actually longer than the list of things that have already been fixed. Pending issues include things like adding support for SLI and Crossfire, for the latest DLC & Season Pass content, and for additional updates such as Photo Mode; fixing a Windows 7 specific issue that happened with 8GB of RAM and some NVIDIA GPUs during long sessions (the most weirdly specific fix we’ve ever seen), and improvements to Windows 10 issues with certain AMD GPUs.
As of this writing, Batman: Arkham Knight is still not available on Steam, PC gaming’s largest digital storefront, with the game’s page just listing its availability as “Fall 2015.”
