Ever since its release in 2015, Batman: Arkham Knight has had a terrible performance profile. The initial release had absolutely horrid performance that was best covered by a
Total Biscuit video in which he described seeing “hitching and frame-rate drops, especially when driving or flying fast around the city”, and that wasn’t an isolated experience — the situation got so bad that the PC version was removed from sale.
The game later returned to retail with an update which
Digital Foundry covered in a 2015 video and found to be neither good-enough nor efficient: hitches and stuttering were still around, and the GPU was far from being fully utilized. Digital Foundry revisited Arkham Knight again in a
2018 video, with the video title calling it “One of PC’s Worst ports” and the intro voice-over referring to it as “The dreaded PC version” — and then again in a
2019 video covering the re-release on the Epic Games Store which comes sans DRM. Richard Leadbetter even calls Arkham Knight’s performance “a puzzle [he’s] been trying to crack for years now”. I liked the game a lot yet suffered from its performance even on top-tier hardware — and technical puzzles, especially ones related to game performance, captivate me. So I decided I’d take a stab at this one. FWIW, all my work has been with the GameWorks effects turned off.