[PCGamer, Gamepur] Batman Arkham Knight System Requirements, May Receive DX12 Patch

[Red Hawk]

The official requirements have been announced for Batman Arkham Knight. On the graphics card side, only Nvidia products were cited, so we're left to figure what the AMD equivalent is.

http://www.pcgamer.com/arkham-knight-system-requirements-revealed/

Assuming they are accurate, they are a little concerning to me. GTX 660 as a minimum? The GTX 660 is significantly faster than the cut down Bonaire chip in the Xbox One, so that may indicate worse optimization on PC than on consoles. I'm left wondering if DirectX 12 could help the game be more optimized.

And, as it turns out, we may find out! A report on MSI's official website said this:

"The most exciting part of Windows 10 for gamers is the introduction of DirectX 12. You are likely to start seeing the benefits of the new graphics technology already in The Witcher 3, Batman: Arkham Knight and more games released later this year. Some CPU-bound games like MMO's are able get a performance bump of up to 50% according to Microsoft."

implying that Arkham Knight (along with Witcher 3) will have DirectX 12 support. Since the retail release of Windows 10 is a ways off, this probably means the DX12 renderer will be patched in post-launch for each game. I'm hopeful that DX12 will provide genuine improvements for Arkham Knight, but also a little worried, because Rocksteady's first shot at DirectX 11 with Arkham City was quite a train wreck on release.

http://www.gamepur.com/news/18647-b...3-will-get-dx12-support-patch-no-details.html

Anyways, here are the actual requirements:

Minimum System Requirements

• 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 Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660
• Graphics Memory: 2 GB
• DirectX®: 11
• Network: Broadband Internet Connection Required
• Hard Drive Space: 45 GB

Recommended System Requirements

• OS: Win 7 SP1, Win 8.1 (64-bit Operating System Required)
• Processor: Intel Core i7-3770, 3.4 GHz | AMD FX-8350, 4.0 GHz
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760
• Graphics Memory: 3 GB
• DirectX®: 11
• Network: Broadband Internet Connection Required
• Hard Drive Space: 55 GB

ULTRA System Requirements

• OS: Win 7 SP1, Win 8.1 (64-bit Operating System Required)
• Processor: Intel Core i7-3770, 3.4 GHz | AMD FX-8350, 4.0 GHz
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980
• Graphics Memory: 3 GB
• DirectX®: 11
• Network: Broadband Internet Connection Required
• Hard Drive Space: 55 GB

 

[poofyhairguy]

Watch some company bundle this game with a 2GB card.

 

[Blue_Max]

Watch some company bundle this game with a 2GB card.

Or a 4GB low-end card.

 

[Techhog]

Watch some company bundle this game with a 2GB card.

It's a given that this will be the next 900-series gift.

Looks like another game I can't max out. Remind me why I shouldn't upgrade to an i7 again? I bought this 970 so I could play this game with PhysX, but it looks like I'll have to keep it off anyway. I regret my purchase now. I really should have waited. Oh well.

 

[Silverforce11]

The official requirements have been announced for Batman Arkham Knight. On the graphics card side, only Nvidia products were cited, so we're left to figure what the AMD equivalent is.

AMD: We've approached the developers of Batman: AK to provide optimizations & detailed game requirement specifications but they refused.

 

[Riceninja]

seriously 980 as the ultra requirement? i just bought a 970....

 

[RussianSensation]

Assuming they are accurate, they are a little concerning to me. GTX 660 as a minimum? The GTX 660 is significantly faster than the cut down Bonaire chip in the Xbox One, so that may indicate worse optimization on PC than on consoles.

Aren't Batman games always running way faster on NV cards? I would presume a GTX660/660Ti would deliver far higher fps and graphical quality than the XB1. I don't think XB1 has even been confirmed to run at 1080P. If it does, I expect 30 fps.
http://attackofthefanboy.com/news/batman-arkham-knight-1080p-on-ps4-xbox-one-version-still-unknown/

As far as this game goes, your GPU isn't exactly cutting edge. Not on an special sale, an R9 280 3GB regularly sells for $150 on Newegg. If you are concerned about VRAM and GPU performance bottleneck on your card, I think you can do an upgrade at or around the game's launch. With R9 290s going for $240 regularly, I think you'll be able to catch a $200 R9 290 card on sale from now until June 23rd. If you can sell your 270X for $90-100, that will be a pretty big upgrade.

 

[RussianSensation]

AMD: We've approached the developers of Batman: AK to provide optimizations & detailed game requirement specifications but they refused.

For as long as I remember, all Batman Arkham series were heavily NV-optimized. I'd go as far as to say it's basically made for NV cards and I expect Batman AK to be loaded to the teeth with GW's features.

CF support has been a hit and miss in these titles.

There is no doubt that NV should run this game better. In Origins, GTX760 tied 7970 and 780 was nearly 40% faster than the 7970Ghz, while stock 780 SLI was 65% faster than HD7990. How many games can you think of where you see this sort of brand bias? I wouldn't be surprised if 980 was 40-50% faster than an R9 290X in this title. ^_^

This time AMD might have lucked out because they had to make the game for GCN on PS4/XB1 so I guess 980 might only lead by 30-40% heheh.

seriously 980 as the ultra requirement? i just bought a 970....

You can generally overclock the 970 to come close or each reach a stock 980 in performance.

 

[Red Hawk]

Aren't Batman games always running way faster on NV cards? I would presume a GTX660/660Ti would deliver far higher fps and graphical quality than the XB1. I don't think XB1 has even been confirmed to run at 1080P. If it does, I expect 30 fps.
http://attackofthefanboy.com/news/batman-arkham-knight-1080p-on-ps4-xbox-one-version-still-unknown/

As far as this game goes, your GPU isn't exactly cutting edge. Not on an special sale, an R9 280 3GB regularly sells for $150 on Newegg. If you are concerned about VRAM and GPU performance bottleneck on your card, I think you can do an upgrade at or around the game's launch. With R9 290s going for $240 regularly, I think you'll be able to catch a $200 R9 290 card on sale from now until June 23rd. If you can sell your 270X for $90-100, that will be a pretty big upgrade.

You'd think a 660 would deliver higher FPS and graphical quality than an Xbox One. My problem is, that's listed as the minimum. What effective frame rate/graphical quality are they using as the minimum standard? If it's the same as or below the quality level provided by an Xbox One, then it indicates the game is poorly optimized, as the game should be able to do better with a 660. If it's above the quality level provided by an Xbox One, then I don't think they're using a proper standard for the minimum requirement. The minimum is supposed to represent what it takes to make the game playable, and the game will certainly be at least playable on Xbox One.

And yes, I know my graphics card is far from cutting edge. I'll upgrade when I can, thanks though. ^_^

 

[RussianSensation]

You'd think a 660 would deliver higher FPS and graphical quality than an Xbox One.

I am pretty sure it will. I wouldn't be surprised if the Xbox One version runs at 900P @ 30 fps or dips as low as 30 fps in places. As far as IQ goes, I would imagine XB1's settings are equivalent to low-medium on the PC. Since this game isn't out for another 2 months, it's hard to speculate right now how well-optimized it is.

 

[Silverforce11]

As a cross-platform game, which do you think developers will put more effort towards, optimizing for both consoles with similar architecture or optimize for PC?

 

[RussianSensation]

As a cross-platform game, which do you think developers will put more effort towards, optimizing for both consoles with similar architecture or optimize for PC?

First they'll optimize for both consoles because 80% of unit sales will be on the consoles. Then they'll sign a marketing agreement with NV to promote GW, take $$$ for that, and accept closed-sourced proprietary GW's code that NV alters as it sees best to fit its agenda to get gamers to upgrade their GPUs from older GTX200, Fermi and Kepler series. As a result, the developer wins no matter what. Since NV provides and has full ownership of the entire GW's code, the developer can't do anything at all to ensure the game can run maxed out on a GTX680 instead of on a 980. NV has full control over the all the optimizations. Naturally AMD doesn't have access to any of the code related to the facial shader (Facial Works) or lighting effects (Volumetric Lights) and environmental effects (Rain Effects) in the game since the source code for all of these is made and provided by NV.

For the last Batman game, NV threw everything and the kitchen sink under GW's banner: tessellation, PhysX, HBAO+, PCSS+, NVDOF (that's right Nvidia "Depth of Field" ), TXAA, etc.

As far as I am concerned, Batman AK series games might as well be called Nvidia's Batman AK series. From day 1 the developer ONLY works with NV.

I remember for one of the AK games, HD7000 performance increased more than 50% with new drivers months after release.

Does that cape look like it's made of millions of triangles? But it is!

Luckily for us, the Batman AK series has not been demanding on GPUs and has generally ran really well on all hardware since the graphics in those games are usually average, which meant that a mid-range GPU could handle those games easily.

 

[frozentundra123456]

It's a given that this will be the next 900-series gift.

Looks like another game I can't max out. Remind me why I shouldn't upgrade to an i7 again? I bought this 970 so I could play this game with PhysX, but it looks like I'll have to keep it off anyway. I regret my purchase now. I really should have waited. Oh well.

Are you concerned about cpu or gpu? I think your cpu should be fine, especially at 4.2.
Seems the devs somehow just state 3770k without any real logic behind it, and most games still show the historical trend that i7 is only a few percent faster than i3. I think a 970 should be fine also except maybe for some features that use a lot of resources but add very little to the game.

 

[DiogoDX]

First they'll optimize for both consoles because 80% of unit sales will be on the consoles. Then they'll sign a marketing agreement with NV to promote GW, take $$$ for that, and accept closed-sourced proprietary GW's code that NV alters as it sees best to fit its agenda to get gamers to upgrade their GPUs from older GTX200, Fermi and Kepler series. As a result, the developer wins no matter what. Since NV provides and has full ownership of the entire GW's code, the developer can't do anything at all to ensure the game can run maxed out on a GTX680 instead of on a 980. NV has full control over the all the optimizations. Naturally AMD doesn't have access to any of the code related to the facial shader (Facial Works) or lighting effects (Volumetric Lights) and environmental effects (Rain Effects) in the game since the source code for all of these is made and provided by NV.

For the last Batman game, NV threw everything and the kitchen sink under GW's banner: tessellation, PhysX, HBAO+, PCSS+, NVDOF (that's right Nvidia "Depth of Field" ), TXAA, etc.

As far as I am concerned, Batman AK series games might as well be called Nvidia's Batman AK series. From day 1 the developer ONLY works with NV.

I remember for one of the AK games, HD7000 performance increased more than 50% with new drivers months after release.

Does that cape look like it's made of millions of triangles? But it is!

Luckily for us, the Batman AK series has not been demanding on GPUs and has generally ran really well on all hardware since the graphics in those games are usually average, which meant that a mid-range GPU could handle those games easily.

If I recall well the Origins game studio Warner Bros refused to add the AMD optimizations for the game (most on tesselation). So AMD did only the driver optimization like AA.

If the benchmark is done with 8xAA radeons do well but lacks performance with no AA compared with Nvidias cards.

I do my part as a radeon user and don't buy their games.

 

[Red Hawk]

If I recall well the Origins game studio Warner Bros refused to add the AMD optimizations for the game (most on tesselation). So AMD did only the driver optimization like AA.

If the benchmark is done with 8xAA radeons do well but lacks performance with no AA compared with Nvidias cards.

I do my part as a radeon user and don't buy their games.

Origins was kind of treated like a redheaded stepchild to the other Arkham games. It was made by a different studio, not Rocksteady, was incredibly buggy, and after a few patches the developers threw their hands up and literally admitted that they knew game breaking bugs were still in the game, but they weren't going to patch it any more and instead were focused on DLC. Yeah. I don't expect the same behavior out of Rocksteady with Arkham Knight.

Arkham City was a technical mess when it came out, yes, but it was borked on both AMD and Nvidia hardware. They did fix it up eventually. I'm too much of a Batman fan to pass up on a great Batman game because they don't give my IHV enough attention, and Arkham City is a truly great game.

 

[RussianSensation]

Arkham City was a technical mess when it came out, yes, but it was borked on both AMD and Nvidia hardware. They did fix it up eventually. I'm too much of a Batman fan to pass up on a great Batman game because they don't give my IHV enough attention, and Arkham City is a truly great game.

I think in general your CPU is still excellent and regardless of the Batman AK game, your CPU can easily survive a GPU upgrade with performance as fast as Titan X @ 1.4Ghz. Is 4.2Ghz the max it will do or you just found a sweet spot for voltage/power usage that you are comfortable with? A lot of 2500Ks can do 4.5Ghz+. Either way, that 2500K @ 4.2Ghz was a great investment for you and I think in your shoes if I had to make a choice between moving to Skylake / mid-range GPU, I'd either keep the 2500K and get a higher end GPU down the line or alternatively try to sell the 2500K and get a 3770K and a higher-end GPU. You really have a decent amount of options because 2500K @ 4.2Ghz isn't exactly a serious bottleneck. :thumbsup: The bottom line is I think with your GPU, it's better to invest the funds into a GPU upgrade than worry about a CPU bottleneck / moving to Skylake. I think your main platform can last another 2-2.5 years until 7-10nm Intel CPUs and 8GB of RAM is still plenty fine for modern games if you close office apps, etc.

 

[escrow4]

Nothing special about those requirements. You need an i5 now for a minimum (preferably Haswell which has a gap in favour in recent games like GTA V), at least 8GB+ of RAM and as much GPU muscle as you can chuck in, so 980 or above if you want pretty settings and solid 60FPS. Consoles still can't do 1080p consistently, and certainly not with the settings PCs have. We have moved on from Core 2.

Also, those CPU requirements are getting very popular for devs (the 3770 + FX combo), Mordor had them (for some reason), AC: Unity has them, V has them adjusted to an i5 (which is accurate too), Witcher III has them . . . . .

 

[Techhog]

Are you concerned about cpu or gpu? I think your cpu should be fine, especially at 4.2.
Seems the devs somehow just state 3770k without any real logic behind it, and most games still show the historical trend that i7 is only a few percent faster than i3. I think a 970 should be fine also except maybe for some features that use a lot of resources but add very little to the game.

I got this card specifically so I could use PhysX, but now it looks like I'll have to keep it off anyway unless I suck it up deal with 30FPS. :/

 

[RussianSensation]

Nothing special about those requirements. You need an i5 now for a minimum (preferably Haswell which has a gap in favour in recent games like GTA V), at least 8GB+ of RAM and as much GPU muscle as you can chuck in, so 980 or above if you want pretty settings and solid 60FPS. Consoles still can't do 1080p consistently, and certainly not with the settings PCs have. We have moved on from Core 2.

Also, those CPU requirements are getting very popular for devs (the 3770 + FX combo), Mordor had them (for some reason), AC: Unity has them, V has them adjusted to an i5 (which is accurate too), Witcher III has them . . . . .

A couple points. I don't agree that i5 around Haswell level is bare minimum. You can play a lot of modern games perfectly fine on an overclocked i7 920/860 or even i5 760 as long as you have a high overclock of 3.9-4Ghz. Some of those CPUs will bottleneck a Titan X, but a 970/290X or even a 980? Not that much.

I don't know of a single game that benefits from > 8GB of RAM other than loading times. A lot of people buy 16GB just cuz but I've literally never seen any review show any advantage of any kind for gaming. 16GB for gaming has been a waste for as long as I remember. However with DDR3 RAM prices so cheap today, I guess it's why people just go for 8GBx2 sticks.

As far as GPU requirements go, I agree with you. When games like Doom3, Far Cry 1 or Crysis 1/3 came out, there was NO way you could play those games on Ultra maxed on on any single GPU out. Yet, with Batman AK, a mid-range next gen chip - the 980 - is good enough. That doesn't seem steep considering Crysis 1 ripped 8800GTX SLI apart, and then did the same to 280/285 SLI and the same to 480 SLI.

How long did it take before we could have 60 fps with everything maxed out in Crysis 3? It just happened last month with a $1000 GPU!

So overall, I don't feel that asking for 760 4GB card as recommended spec and 980 for Ultra for a June 2015 game is that shocking. I bet TW3 will be way more demanding.

 

[skipsneeky2]

Obviously this game isn't using UE3.I haven't kept up much with this title but what engine is this thing using anyways?UE4?

Hoping we get pass UE3 now,damn engine is nearly 8 years old.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I got this card specifically so I could use PhysX, but now it looks like I'll have to keep it off anyway unless I suck it up deal with 30FPS. :/

I would just wait and see, BTW, i meant to say i7 is only a bit fasrer than i5, not i3.

 

[Techhog]

Obviously this game isn't using UE3.I haven't kept up much with this title but what engine is this thing using anyways?UE4?

Hoping we get pass UE3 now,damn engine is nearly 8 years old.

It's still UE3-based.

I would just wait and see, BTW, i meant to say i7 is only a bit fasrer than i5, not i3.

This is a console port. I have no doubt that all of these requirements have a 30FPS target. Thus, I'll have to choose between PhysX + High-to-Ultra settings + 30FPS, PhysX + medium settings + 60FPS, or PhysX off + 60FPS. Really making me question my choices and if I should have just bought a PS4 instead. Better than the mid-low settings my 7950 would have had to deal with due to GameWorks I guess. (No idea why anyone thinks that the tiny effects in GameWorks justify how anti-competitive it is.)

 

[Deders]

seriously 980 as the ultra requirement? i just bought a 970....

When I had a 560TI, with Arkham City I was able to overclock my cpu (not gpu) and still run PhysX on full on a single card. Couldn't handle it without the overclock.

 

[sontin]

I do my part as a radeon user and don't buy their games.

A shame. The Batman games are one of the best pc games of the last 6 years.

Origins was kind of treated like a redheaded stepchild to the other Arkham games. It was made by a different studio, not Rocksteady, was incredibly buggy, and after a few patches the developers threw their hands up and literally admitted that they knew game breaking bugs were still in the game, but they weren't going to patch it any more and instead were focused on DLC. Yeah. I don't expect the same behavior out of Rocksteady with Arkham Knight.

The PC version had only one game breaking bug: The Riddler tower. They fixed it a week or so later. Despite this problem the game was flawless.

Arkham City was a technical mess when it came out, yes, but it was borked on both AMD and Nvidia hardware. They did fix it up eventually. I'm too much of a Batman fan to pass up on a great Batman game because they don't give my IHV enough attention, and Arkham City is a truly great game.

Why should Rocksteady care about AMD? It was AMD who didnt care when Rocksteady produced Batman:AA.

 

[SPBHM]

minimum GTX 660? they must be doing something really wrong with the PC version of this game, since it's also on the Xbox One, and I doubt they are investing heavily on the PC specific version