Between the last few months of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, a lot of PC games launched in a problematic state (mostly due to the now infamous shader compilation stuttering), including Gotham Knights from Warner Bros. Games Montréal.
In my review of the game, I wrote:
Lastly, we get the real thorn in Gotham Knights’ side: its performance. Worries began circulating even ahead of its launch after it became known that there would be no Performance Mode, limiting frame rate to 30FPS on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X. We reviewed the game on PC, where the performance was greatly hampered by stuttering, especially when moving quickly through the city with the grappling hook or the Batcycle.
Even with DLSS (2.0) set to Performance Mode and ray tracing turned off (by the way, you cannot turn on lighting, shadows, or reflections, it’s either all disabled or enabled), the gameplay experience was far from smooth on a powerful hardware equipped with an RTX 3090 GPU and an i7 12700KF CPU. When trying to activate ray tracing, the experience got worse even with DLSS on Ultra Performance mode (at 4K, that means rendering from a base of 720p).
The Unreal Engine 4 powered visuals are more than satisfying even without ray tracing, but it’s nonetheless disappointing that such a configuration would suffer similar struggles.
It was the low point of the so-called #StutterStruggle for PC gamers. Thankfully, several of those titles have since been updated to fix the shader compilation stuttering and improve the overall optimization. Gotham Knights in particular received a lot of patches, the most recent of which from February 15th prompted Digital Foundry to re-review the game due to the extent of the improvements. The game didn’t just have issues on PC; it was problematic even on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X, where it often dropped below the 30FPS target frame rate. Thanks to the optimizations introduced with the updates, Gotham Knights now runs at near-locked 30FPS on consoles. Digital Foundry also praised the PC version, so I decided to redownload the game to find out how much of an improvement it really was.
Long story short: a massive one. Granted, when I first played the game at launch, I was still using an RTX 3090 GPU, while I’ve now upgraded to the significantly more powerful RTX 4090. But the CPU and RAM remained the same, and despite going much higher with the settings (DLSS Quality, ray tracing enabled, everything else on max), Gotham Knights is now silky smooth to play on practically every occasion. I’ve captured a section of open world gameplay that averaged 107.5 FPS, but most importantly, the stuttering is completely gone, even when using the Batcycle. The CapFrameX benchmark software has a built-in metric for stuttering which was never triggered in my session, remaining at 0% in the final results.
While there won’t be an explicit message for the user, Gotham Knights now compiles shaders when you first boot it up, which helps a lot. But the CPU optimization has improved, too. You can check out nearly half an hour of smooth gameplay below, where the frame rate never goes below 70 FPS with no noticeable hitches. Overall, it’s a night-and-day performance change that makes this solid open world action RPG an easy recommendation for any DC fan.
Moreover, it is a sign that game developers have finally taken stock of the massive displeasure PC gamers expressed at these poor launches. Now, if only they would understand the importance of fixing the games before they launch instead of doing it weeks or months later, that would be great.
Until then, the recommendation is obvious: if a game has problems at launch, wait until it is fixed. Chances are it will be improved in performance and other areas, not to mention cheaper to buy. Patience is truly a PC gamer’s best friend.
