As many PC gamers alarmingly realized yesterday after installing the long-awaited conclusion to Rocksteady Studios’ beloved franchise, the Batman: Arkham Knight PC port is far from perfect. In fact, the amount of criticism it’s garnered has led to a 2.5-star user rating on Steam, mainly due to its poor optimization for even some of the more high-end graphics cards. And, while Nvidia has issued Game Ready drivers for PC users touting corresponding hardware, AMD owners have been largely out of luck.
Finally, after acknowledging its technical blemishes via the official Batman: Arkham Knight online forums, Rocksteady has updated the recommended, minimum, and ultra hardware requirements to realistically meet expectations. Most notably, the AMD Radeon 7870 with 2GB of RAM minimum requirement has been raised to a Radeon 7950 with 3GB of memory. The complete rundown can be found in WB Games’ PC support forums.
The ideal settings for a system that meets the minimum requirements of Batman: Arkham Knight are as follows:
- Resolution: 1,280 x 720
- V-Sync: Off
- Anti-Aliasing: Off
- Texture Resolution: Low
- Shadow Quality: Low
- Level of Detail: Low
- Interactive Smoke/Fog: Off
- Interactive Paper Debris: Off
- Enhanced Rain: Off
- Enhanced Light Shafts: Off
In the aforementioned update announcement, Rocksteady suggests that PC gamers playing on bare-minimum hardware should maintain the default “Low” texture resolution. Increasing texture resolution to “Normal” is said to provoke major performance issues. Likewise, boosting the resolution in-game to anything higher than 720p is also prone to error.
The optimal settings for recommended hardware when playing Batman: Arkham Knight are listed below:
- Resolution: 1,920 x 1,080
- V-Sync: On
- Anti-Aliasing: On
- Texture Resolution: Normal
- Shadow Quality: Normal
- Level of Detail: Normal
- Interactive Smoke/Fog: Off
- Interactive Paper Debris: Off
- Enhanced Rain: Off
- Enhanced Light Shafts: Off
Whatever the case may be, Rocksteady assures us that it’s working hard to resolve the many performance hiccups being experienced by purchasers of Batman: Arkham Knight — that even with the necessary specs and settings, “minor texture pops” and “hitches and stuttering when gliding or driving the Batmobile” are unpreventable in the game’s current state. The developer has even gone as far as to remind us of the recently launched Steam refund policy which, for many PC gamers, could not have landed at a more convenient time.
