In a move that does nothing to inspire confidence in the future of console ports to PC, Warner Bros. has issued a statement apologizing for the continuing issues with Batman: Arkham Knight, announcing the availability of full refunds for anyone who purchased the game on Steam through the end of this year.
The refund offer has no restrictions on play time, allowing those who purchased the game at any time to get their money back. This unprecedented move, coming after the removal of the PC game for sale on Steam and subsequent re-release last week, dooms the PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight. With the announcement Warner Bros. Games appears to be withdrawing support, as they previously had been promising fixes for the problems plaguing the game.
It remains to be seen if Warner has simply decided to cut their losses and rely on console sales for the latest entry in the Batman franchise. The question going forward will be whether Warner attempts to port the next installment to the PC at all after this disastrous release.
I’m surprised that WB has not
I’m surprised that WB has not blamed it on the Joker! Things have gone Batty at the Dancing Frog.
I’d like to know how many PC
I’d like to know how many PC sales they made versus console sales. I just assume that eventually the hassle of this magnitude won’t be worth a publisher’s investment and they’ll just stop making ports altogether. If after all this time they still couldn’t manage to fix the performance issues, they might just give up entirely for the next game.
Looking at the steamspy
Looking at the steamspy numbers it’s sitting around 500k owners, the 1st 2 have sold around 2.5 million each and origins about 1.6 million. Those 3 have all been through sales alot though.
I actually think that 500k is impressive for the drama surrounding it. I’m guessing WB are doing this as it appears there seems to be alot of people happy to play it however bad it is. The steamspy number was around 300k when they took it off sale so they appear to be getting more sales than refunds either way.
In this case definitely
In this case definitely GameNOTWorks. In other cases it is debatable at best.
Oh get off your AMD high
Oh get off your AMD high horse and NVIDIA is bad hyperbole. Nvidia and AMD both create TOOLS that developers can utilize so they can speed up and reduce the cost of developing games. They make ready to go effects so that developers don’t have to custom code / develop them from scratch. That’s all they are, PROGRAMING TOOLS!
It’s up to AMD / NVIDIA to optimise how their graphics card talks to the game. That’s all a driver is. It drives the communication between the video card and the program ie game. If you have bad performance with your AMD / ATI video card you should get after AMD for not working closer with developers and putting out poor performing drivers that don’t live up to your expectations. If they continue to do it, STOP BUYING THEIR PRODUCT.
AMD is significantly less active in partnering with development studios. As a result, more games come out with NVIDIA GameWorks based effects. That’s that. Plain and simple.
Of course NVIDIA drivers work better with NVIDIA based development tools. They know the ins and outs of it. Of course they’re going to make tools that work better with their video card technology. Why would you put work into code that handicaps the product you’re trying to sell and bolsters the performance of your top competitor?
NVIDIA has no business interest (yes, shocker, NVIDIA is a business – It’s sole existence is to make money and bolster things that make them more money like GameWorks) in making coding tools that work well with their competitors graphics cards / APU’s / chips / what have you.
If you’re going to get upset with someone, don’t get upset with the company who makes a better product that you didn’t buy and who’s technology you thereby do not support and do not back – get mad with the company who developed the game and chose NVIDIA GameWorks over AMD whatever it is. Get mad at AMD for not working closer with more developers to make better drivers for their games, show them just how many people have AMD products and that you’re a better segment of the market to appeal to than the NVIDIA bunch.
You’re getting mad at the wrong company. And all of this has NOTHING to do with NVIDIA. At the end of the day it is up to the developers of a game to properly implement code from tools. NVIDIA doesn’t control the development of the game. You can slap GameWorks on a turd (ahem Arkham Knight) and it’s still going to be a poop. At the end of the day, it’s still poop. Maybe poop with volumetric fog. Maybe you can’t plop as many turds per second as you’d like. But still poop.
This specific case doesn’t
This specific case doesn’t have much to do with GameWorks, although even if you have hardware which can sort of run this game, you probably can’t turn on GameWorks. People seem to need to either turn GameWorks off or do the modification to turn down the tesselation. It is set too high, even for nvidia cards to handle. I would say that this was done specifically to make AMD’s cards look bad. There seems to be a lot of anticompetitive practices associated with GameWorks, so people should be unhappy with Nvidia for this reason alone. Putting GameWorks in games at tesselation levels that their own cards can’t even support is ridiculous.
This is a problem with the
This is a problem with the developer. NVIDIA does not control the development of the game. GameWorks is a toolkit for developers, not a service. It is up to the developers to properly implement.
If I’m building a house and code calls screws, but I use nails instead and things fall apart it isn’t the fault of the person who sold me tools to build the house. It’s my fault for not building the house properly.
You people that seem to think NVIDIA is building the game or that things pass through NVIDIA have some rose tinted glasses the shade of AMD Red.
I think that is a bad
I think that is a bad analogy. Nvidia is the market leader, so they can get away with pushing proprietary “tools” on developers. These “tools” are designed and delivered in a manner specifically to make it impossible to optimize for any competing products. This is a pretty clear abuse of market position. This stuff goes on all of the time, but that doesn’t make it okay. If you are old enough and happened to be paying attention to the hardware world of the time, you would remember all of the anticompetitive practices (some outright illegal) that went on around the time AMD released the K8 processor. It was obviously superior to the P4, but Intel did all kinds of things to try to keep AMD out of the market. They also tried to kill DDR memory in favor of Rambus memory. I knew some people who got stuck with a P4 with SDRAM that performed worse than the Pentium 3 that preceded it. It doesn’t matter who the market leader is; if they can get away with such things, the they will do them. Hopefully developers will choose to go with more open solutions which can be optimized for any hardware. AMD can’t push their own proprietary solutions since they have such a small share of the market. It is the same shit with g-sync vs. free sync. Nvidia is pushing a proprietary solution with a vendor lock-in. I am not buying it.
I am running an Intel and Nvidia based system right now, but for my next system, I am definitely thinking of switching it up to AMD if their upcoming products deliver. I also believe that HSA/APUs is the way computing is headed. I would choose AMD graphics over Intel graphics and I would choose AMD CPUs over Nvidia CPUs. AMD is the only company that can offer the whole package right now, which is probably a big part of why they are powering all of the consoles. This should give AMD some advantage in what developers optimize and what “tools” they choose to use, but the current differences between consoles and PCs may be an issue. If developers architect their game with the consoles as the target, then there may be big issues with porting to PC. If they don’t take advantage of the features an APU offers in the consoles, then it may make it easier to port to PC, but it may not perform as well on the console.
The distinction that needs to
The distinction that needs to be made – and that you’re conveniently forgetting/ignoring in order to make your point – is that AMD “whatever it is”, aka the “tools” that AMD makes for game developers to use, is free and open. When a game developer uses a tool AMD develops – say, for example, TressFX – Nvidia can go to the AMD website and download the most current source code for that tool and use that source code to optimize their drivers to use that tool.
Nvidia Gameworks, on the other hand, is a closed-source “lockbox”. When a game developer uses a tool Nvidia develops – say, for example, HairWorks (which, I might add, is quite simply “tessellate the ever loving crap out of it” written in code) – there’s nothing AMD can do. They can’t go get the source code from Nvidia, at least not without paying them a metric f**kton of cash, which they can’t afford anyway. They can’t reverse-engineer the code without getting slapped with a lawsuit. They’re stuck with debugging the output of the black-box module and trying to guess what changes need to be made to what’s being input into the black-box module.
See Tomb Raider and TressFX for my first example. Nvidia users were furious when the game came out and using TressFX made the game work worse on Nvidia cards than it did on AMD cards. Within a week, Nvidia released a driver update and, thanks to their having access to the TressFX source code, all of a sudden the game worked BETTER than AMD on Nvidia cards with TressFX enabled.
See Witcher 3 and HairWorks for my second example. AMD users were furious when the game came out and using HairWorks made the game work like absolute garbage on AMD cards. Within a week, the only thing AMD could do was put a forced software cap on tessellation. Sure, there was a marginal (if even that much) sacrifice to the hair quality in exchange for running it at 8x max tessellation instead of defaulting to 64x, but that was literally all they could do.
That’s why some people have such a problem with GameWorks.
Well atleast they are giving
Well atleast they are giving refunds, i never bought the game as i though it was repetitive with not really new game mechanics besides the batmobile
what about the ones that got
what about the ones that got the game with Nvidia GPU’s will they give us a new game or will we have to just hope that WB fix the game
I have to wonder what exactly
I have to wonder what exactly they did that made it so hard to port to PC. Did they architect it based on having 8 GB of fast DRAM? We need to get some high performance APUs with HBM or at least GDDR5x. I am hoping we will start seeing such APUs in laptops soon.
From an arstechnica
From an arstechnica article:
“Currently, the game still suffers from “a hard drive paging issue with some GPUs on Windows 7,” while Windows 10 users require “at least 12GB of system RAM” to ensure the game operates without stuttering.”
Are they actually paging GPU memory all the way out to disk on win7? Recommending 12 GB of memory for win10 is ridiculous. Memory isn’t that expensive but a lot of the installed base is still at less than 8 GB. This definatey seems to be an issue with the consoles having 8 GB of unified memory. With the PC, you have a copy of everything in GPU memory in system memory also. There is also the latency of copying data from system memory over the PCI-e bus to the video card. With the console, they just pass a pointer and the GPU component can access it directly with almost no latency. Then there is the limited GPU memory. Most players probably have a 2 GB card, a few at 4 GB, and probably a very small number at 8 GB. The PC gamers are asking why they can’t play this game smoothly on superior hardware but it isn’t actually superior hardware with respect to the memory system. The PS4 has superior memory system; it is a lot more efficient. You don’t have to keep extra copies around and you do not have to work around the latency of copying from system memory to graphics memory. While they seem to have architected it very badly from the PC perspective, not taking advantage of the superior memory system on consoles will limit performance. The low latency offered by HSA will be important for VR also. PCs are going to need to move in this direction.
Has Pcper run any of their frame rate analyzing tools with Arkam Night? If tested with different hardware configurations, it should shed some light on what is going on, and determine what is actually required to run the game smoothly. It would be funny if one of AMDs newer HSA APUs could actually run this game. It is probably unlikely though, due to the slow memory still used with the desktop APUs.
It’s different code. You’re
It’s different code. You’re talking about three different games essentially that look the same. You can’t compare them.
It’d be like comparing flag, touch and tackle ‘American’ football. They all look the same, but they’re each a very different game when it comes to rules and strategy.
Let’s talk more about consoles when they’re running at 1080p on the regular 🙂
I am not a talking about
I am not a talking about running the frame time analyzing tools on a console. I am talking about just analyzing the frame times with different amounts of system memory and different amounts of GPU memory on a PC to see where it actually hits the bottlenecks while holding as much of the rest of the system as constant as possible. It would also be interesting to see how it performs on an HSA enabled APU, although it is almost certainly unplayable on an APU with DDR3.
‘It remains to be seen if
‘It remains to be seen if Warner has simply decided to cut their losses and rely on console sales for the latest entry in the Batman franchise. The question going forward will be whether Warner attempts to port the next installment to the PC at all after this disastrous release.’
^ This. Cutting their losses was mostly likely the impetus behind this recent decision. Makes sense, but ya never know. And in regards to future. I’d hope they’d realize they have a really good thing going in this genre of game, and elect to address both markets (console and pc) effectively. But again, ya never know. And Im even more speculative about this as opposed to their decision with knights. I wouldnt really be surprised if this exact situation reared its ugly head again. Disappointed yes. But not surprised or disillusioned. Because ultimately, as we all know, consoles are what move the chains of the video gaming industry. Moreover, their success also kinda give impetus to the smaller vendors too. The ones that serve us enthusiasts, and provide us with our legit multi-monitor, liquid cooled, quad-gpu rigs. So, thanks consoles! And more importantly, thanks to the huge number of filthy casuals that buy them! 😉 GO BUY BATMAN: ARKHAM KNIGHT FOR THE PS4 OR XBOX1. I HEAR ITS FANTASTIC!!!
I think this was great
I think this was great decision (albeit not surprising) on behalf of this company. It clearly demonstrates that they recognize and acknowledge their users. Now. I wish they had shown the same recognition and acknowledgement when they were porting the game over to the pc in the first place. But meh. The world aint perfect. And at the end of the day. Your are more judged not on how WELL you ride the horse, but what you do when you fall off. And in this case, i feel like they got up and dusted themselves off just as everyone hoped/expected they would. Again, not very surprising. The bad port thing? A different story. True. But company performance and company customer service, are not mutually exclusive. And given this company’s track record in providing quality ports to the pc, customer service was the only thing that was in question here.
Note: personally, im a little upset and disappointed that, unfortunately, it doesnt look like i’ll be able to enjoy this title in my ‘preferred’ manner (on pc). But at the end of the day, given the fact that if I really HAD to play this particular game, i could do so on any number of consoles. And the fact that this same company has a number of other games with similar if not exact or better gameplay. Any notions of disappointment or of being upset quickly dissipate into ‘first-world problem’ land. Life is just too short for me to allow a piece of entertainment to negatively impact it. Gotta pick ur battles
Sorry senor peak. But this
Sorry senor peak. But this DOES in fact offer inspiration for the future of console ports. And actually maybe even something better? It may not be the inspiration that you and I were hoping for (ie functioning software!!!), but its still inspiring nonetheless.
I dont think ‘bad pc ports’ are anything new to this industry. Kind of par for the course. Warners Bros offering refunds for the game until the end of the year with no restrictions on playtime and purchase date??? Thats new to me. No to mention ‘inspiring’ as a consumer. Because i know that i can try this game out (and perhaps other warner games in the future), and i wont have to suffer any potential buyers remorse. So thats definitely ‘positive’. But it actually may go further. I perhaps may wanna say ‘thanks’ to warner bros. Because, unless im missing something (oh, and im SURE i am), according to the ‘restrictions’ governing the refunds for this game, that were outlined in this post. ALL of us can literally play this game on pc until the end of the year. For FREE. Am I missing something here??? I have to be, right? Cuz outta of the other dumdums (im king dumdum btw. my crown :p) that have commented here, no one else has picked up this.
or maybe because even playing
or maybe because even playing this game for free isnt worth ones’ time. Because the word ‘playing’ is being very, very kind. ‘Suffering’ and ‘putting up with’ and more appropriate words and phrases to associate with this game. In which case, the poor souls subjected to such torture, would actually have to be compensated monetarily rather.
Didn’t Tom Petersen say they
Didn’t Tom Petersen say they (GameWorks & QA) were fixing the game ?
http://www.pcgamer.com/nvidias-gameworks-and-qa-teams-are-helping-fix-batman-arkham-asylum/
Guess its fixed by Nvidia GameWorks standards.
The game runs beautifully on
The game runs beautifully on a TITAN X, 5930K, 16 GB RAM. That’s probably not the best example but it’s my example.
I played this game on pc soon
I played this game on pc soon after it’s release and man i had a horrible experience, on my both amd and nvidia cards, it sucked then and it sucks now, it is simply horrible experience. Nvidia said they would put up a team to fix the issues, but actually nothing changed, on my 780 the game stutters all the time, i am really wondering what they have up to all this time, on my 290x the experience is a bit better but still unplayable.
What really makes me angry is that this game on the console plays waaay better, even if it is on 30 fps the game is smooth like butter witch leads me to the only reasonable tough: gameworks ruined another game, one of the many.
What nvidia is doing right now simply is wrong, they take optimized low level code that runs great on mediocre amd hardware on consoles and then ruin it by implementing their own proprietary and unoptimized middleware, a marketing move that is ruining the pc gaming.