The PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight is simply a big clusterF. And from the looks of it, the game reverts back to DX10 when the NVIDIA Gameworks effects are activated. And no, that’s not a joke. This actually happens, and it perfectly shows how big of a mess the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight actually is.

Alt-Tab‘s ‘Thanos Psarogenis’ shared with us an image, showing the keyboard OSD of MSI’s Afterburner program.

In case you’re not aware of, MSI Afterburner is not being displayed when NVIDIA’s Gameworks effects are activated (note: when all four NVIDIA Gameworks effects are enabled, especially the first two). This troubled us, because everything seemed to be working fine when NVIDIA’s effects were disabled.

However, it seems that the game reverts back to DX10 when those effects are activated. As we can see in the following image, the game runs with DX10 when these effects are enabled.

The keyboard that Thanos used was a Logitech G13 (that has an applet for MSI Afterburner). Thanos also disabled the Gameworks effects in order to show that the game runs with DX11 when those effects are disabled.

All in all, the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight is a mess and I’m not sure whether Iron Galaxy or Rocksteady will be able to fix it.

UPDATE:

This could very well be an MSI Afterburner issue or a driver issue (for what is worth, MSI Afterburner 4.1.1 does not work with both the previous and the latest WHQL NVIDIA driver). We’ve contacted NVIDIA and Warner Bros for a comment regarding this issue and we’ll update this story if and when we get an answer.