Batman: Arkham Knight

Games
#1

Yes, this game.

I’d be very interested to know if anyone has managed to get a stutter free 60fps or at a framerate close to 60 with VRR. I’m using the Epic Games Store version. I thought once I had a VRR display this could finally become a non issue but no, even with VRR there’s still obvious occurrences of duplicate frames. I’ve tried every combination of V sync and framerate limiter but no dice. According to SpecialK the game never hits close to 100% GPU usage and VRAM usage rarely increases over 3.5gb. So my final hail mary might be to see if I can increase the VRAM pool in an ini file.

One other thing of note is that the game doesn’t play well with SpecialK texture memory management. Drastically increases pop in and some textures don’t load properly at all. So that should probably be turned off by default for this game

#2

For the first version of the game and some of the less extensive updates they used the common streaming system and just increasing the memory pool up to the maximum supported (3072?) could alleviate the worst of it.

After that from what I understand the game has a sort of grid map and passing through these unloads and loads data which is much harder to alleviate and the game isn’t built around newer tech to take advantage of additional CPU cores or a SSD.

There are benefits but only up to a point before the engine even modified as it is just hits it’s limits and once in the actual car you start hitting these zones rapidly or when gliding at a higher speed though from above the reduced LOD’s slightly help far as I recall but there’s still going to be hitching and stuttering.

Downgrading breaks all kinds of fixes and added/fixed effects plus later DLC support.

DXVK could work but on NVIDIA systems the NVAPI implementation could be a bit tricky for various effects and optimizations and disabling these will either break performance or some of the graphical effects these are used for.
(Getting some of the newer API advantages and features even if not in full one reason even on NVIDIA that DXVK can improve performance by a good margin or mitigate micro stuttering or framerate fluctuations.)

For SpecialK the texture cache might help somewhat but with these grids or zones it’s going to be loading assets anyway so the benefits with this if it works without other Unreal Engine texture issues might be limited as a result.

Capping at a lower framerate also helps but that’s not something I’d recommend the game is a lot better after that 30 FPS cap was removed going back is not optimal.

Don’t have any other good suggestions, console perhaps X Series with backwards compatibility that’s a bit of a suggestion but some of these ports are kinda bad or very tough to get to work without some issues or bottlenecks or other problems unfortunately.

WB was probably eager to drop it too when outsourcing the support only slightly mitigated the reports and poor reviews and by that point the peak sales period had also gone really could have done with more support but that’s true for a lot of their published games even from more accomplished PC development studios.
(Rocksteady I think was mostly doing the console builds, another studio did PC and then a third took over for when they started fixing it up from how I recall.)

EDIT: Bit speculative there at the end, another optimization patch and final QA and fixing up some of the issues would really have helped but it’s a bit of a miracle they stuck around for a while after that major update and the DLC were out to where the rain effect got fixed up before stopping support entirely.

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#3

Wow, that’s all extremely useful and interesting info. Thanks! Stuttering being due to the grid system makes total sense. Sometimes you’re just standing in a random spot and get so many stutters for seemingly no reason as you turn the camera, I guess it’s just due to being on the threshold between two different zones. I think increasing the memory pool might have helped but it’s definitely still not perfect. Oh well. It’s playable anyway.

As I mentioned the SpecialK texture cache really borks this game unfortunately. No luck there!

#4

damn, this one was a mess of a launch.

They took a game designed for consoles that has a unified memory system (same fast memory shared by cpu/gpu) and ported it to a PC ecosystem where you have a “slow” memory for cpu and a fast memory for gpu and needs to transfer it trough a bus at best PCI GEN3.

Unless you could fit it all in the VRAM, no luck.

I should test it with my 1070 and se if 7GB VRAM is enough :smiley: I had a 760 at the time …

#5

Sometimes the staged texture setting can help but Unreal Engine and SpecialK’s texture cache can be hit & miss even with the various settings available for some of the possible compatibility issues that can happen.
Chances are it might not help much in this game although if it could be made compatible I think it’s one of the more effective improvements just retaining more of the texture data and reducing the extra loading or streaming thus improving the game experience reducing stuttering and hitching as this keeps happening in-game when hitting these various zones.

And yeah took a while to read up a bit on the game and issues but I can’t find a good solution, hardware can mitigate the issues somewhat but only to a point and then depending on ones own sensitivity to micro stuttering, choppiness and overall state of frame rate stability or hitching and all that well there seems to be no good solution to really get rid of these issues.

Retaining the textures in cache and avoiding the game re-loading these assets when streaming might help but yeah without the texture cache option as a means to do so that’s not going to help much.
And together with the way the game is now streaming in data trying to add more to the pool size value for cache isn’t as effective.

I’m not the most tech savvy though although I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the PC port and from the state it was in and the various issues that it had and still has after these updates plus what Kaldaien has mentioned about the game on the Steam forums on occasion though it’s been some years now since the ini tweaks were suggested and then the patch just made that much less effective.

But the developers who had to take on the project of fixing up the PC port did end up fixing a lot of stuff too but not everything and the game limitations and engine limitations can be a problem it just needed more time.

#6

All in all, we may need to thank the awful state in which Batman Arkham Knight was released. Otherwise, we may not have Special-K now.

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#7

As told in the wiki!

The framework traces its origin back to 2015 and attempts to fix and improve the state of Batman: Arkham Knight, Fallout 4, and Tales of Zestiria.

If it weren’t for those three… this… “trinity” of games… Special K wouldn’t have been what it is today! :laughing:

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#8

I’d put Dark Souls ahead of those three even though I never directly did anything w/ it. I had the necessary knowledge to build a DSFix-like patch at the time Durante did, but never really connected those dots.

I had no idea just how far API interception could go, I would still think of it largely as a technique for drawing overlays and doing stuff like ReShade. So Durante and Dark Souls are really where this stuff actually begins :slight_smile: I would just accept poorly functioning software as poorly functioning if that had not changed my entire perspective.

#9

OK, this is why this game drives me completely insane.

Look at this video from the 8 minute mark. Richard shows footage of the game locked to 60fps with not a single frame drop to be seen. How come he can do it and I can’t with significantly more powerful hardware? Totally bizarre.

There’s not really enough footage in the video to know for sure that there’s no streaming stutter, and he’s also mostly using the batmobile while I find that gliding high actually pushes the streaming engine harder. Still!

#10

That’s exactly the video that had me trying to figure out what the problem was with my system too! Even with an 8500 + 1060, they can get 60 locked. On my 1660 with 9400F, no way - always get those stutters.

#11

Best not to obsess over that game. It will never function correctly :stuck_out_tongue:

All we can do is use it as a benchmark for future ports, if a game comes along that is more wonky than Arkham Knight is, I’m taking the red pill and getting the hell out of here.

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#12

For a while that was Horizon:Zero Dawn, but it looks like they’ve been able to finally wrangle it down into a good state.

(For me personally right now it’s Death Stranding with it’s micro stuttering, even with a freesync monitor now. But apparently I’m in the minority there.)