Batman: Arkham Knight AMD vs Nvidia Performance Review

Batman: Arkham Knight AMD vs Nvidia Performance Review

| Source: OC3D Price: Author: Mark Campbell

Introduction

When Batman: Arkham Knight was first released on PC it was widely known as being one of the worst PC ports of recent years, being so bad that it had difficulty running on systems which stored the game on a mechanical hard drive instead of an SSD.

With a large number of refunds on Steam and other retailers and mounting bad press for both Warner Bros. and Rocksteady Games it was taken down from steam for some extensive patching and optimization. The fruit of these efforts was finally re-released on Steam, promising to have fixed the majority of the issues which have plagued the original release.

Today we will be testing the re-released version of Batman: Arkham Knight on today's flagship GPUs, just to see how playable the title is. The original release was difficult to play at 1080p on even the highest end systems at the time, so I wonder if the game has improved to such an extent that it could now be played at 4K.

Test Setup

We will be testing this game on our dedicated GPU test rig using the current flagship GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia. Both GPUs will be the reference design and will be ran at stock settings.

Being a Nvidia GameWorks title this game is expected to favor Nvidia GPUs, especially since Nvidia currently offer this game with the purchase of new GPUs. We will see if this prediction is correct as we play and benchmark this game.

AMD R9 Fury X & Nvidia GTX 980Ti

Intel Core i7 6700K

ASUS Maximus VIII Hero

G.Skill Ripjaws 4x4GB DDR4 3200MHz

Corsair HX1200i

Corsair H110i

Windows 10 x64

Nvidia GTX 980Ti (Left), AMD R9 Fury X (Right)

Memory Usage

On Windows 10 users are required to have more system memory than the standard recommended 8GB of RAM due to the fact that Windows 10 uses a different memory management system. The developers currently recommend that users have 12GB of RAM in your system which mean that our test system was more than capable of running the game with it's 16GB of DDR4 Memory.

Right now RAM is available for highly affordable prices, with 8GB of DDR4 memory currently being available from £39 and 8GB of DDR3 being available for as little as £32. With games like Star Wars: Battlefront starting to recommend 16GB of RAM I would recommend that gamers should consider upgrading their systems to get ready for the RAM requirements of future games, especially since prices are very affordable right now.

From my brief looks at my RAM usage in the game the game will use the most RAM when you are driving the batmobile, which on my system was around 10.5GB. This was on Windows 10, so you can expect lower RAM usage on Windows 8 and Windows 7.

Windows 10 RAM

- Many people have taken note of our system RAM recommendation for Windows 10. We have run detailed performance tests on a variety of systems, and in doing so have found that memory usage and management on Windows 10 simply behaves very differently from Windows 7 and Windows 8, most notably with page file compression. Hence, our recommendation for Windows 10 users if this issue is encountered. On a related note, we recommend that the Windows page file remains enabled on all operating systems.

1 - Batman: Arkham Knight AMD vs Nvidia Performance Review 2 - Graphical Options and Settings 3 - Graphical Comparisons - Low, Medium and High Detail settings 4 - Graphical Comparisons - AMD vs Nvidia 5 - 1080p Testing 6 - 1440p Testing 7 - 4K Testing 8 - Conclusion «Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next»

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