Batman Demands 12GB RAM For Windows 10 (steamcommunity.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Back in June, Warner Brothers removed Batman: Arkham Knight from sale after a lot of graphics and performance issues found on the PC version. Now, after spending five months trying to fix this mess, Rocksteady and Warner Bros re-released the game on Steam with some free Batman titles for those who acquired the launch edition. However, Warner Bros noted there are still a few caveats with Windows 10 users recommended to have 12GB of RAM to avoid paging issues: "For Windows 10 users, we've found that having at least 12GB of system RAM on a PC allows the game to operate without paging and provides a smoother gameplay experience." Some initial tests show no performance gains on the re-released version. Warner Bros claims that it's still working closely with its GPU partners in order to enable SLI/Crossfire for the game.

Comments

Another example of bloat

[techno-vampire]

This is nothing more than another example of something I've believed for years: if you give your devs workstations with bleeding-edge speed, the newest graphics cards and far more RAM than most consumer machines can hold, they'll produce games that can only run on their machines. Yes, it's nice to have all of that stuff to make it faster to compile and test your code, but you should also have testing machines with nothing more than a mainstream computer can be expected to have right out of the box and not ship the product until it will run properly on them.

Re:Another example of bloat

[0123456]

My gaming PC from 2013 has 32GB. I've been waiting years for games to catch up with the hardware, but most have been crippled to run on crappy consoles.

Re:Another example of bloat

[tompaulco]

My gaming PC from 2011 has 8GB and I have yet to come across a title that has any problems. Of course, I don't have Batman...OR Windows 10.

Re:Another example of bloat

[AmiMoJo]

Nah, it's just shit coding. They screwed up the memory management so need to avoid paging to prevent performance issues. It's a mistake, and one that they can't seem to fix.

Re:Another example of bloat

[Harlequin80]

Actually I really miss the early days of Origin when the games would come out and if your machine was a year old it wouldn't really work. The wing commander series pushed those machines to the limit and I remember messing with autoexec.bat and config.sys to get the games to work without getting a page overflow.

Games should push the limits. And sure that means there will be a decent number of people who can't play their games without buying an upgrade, but I don't have a problem with that.

That said, building a game which is just lazy and poorly coded and saying that it needs 64gb of ram is a different story.

Re:Another example of bloat

[bloodhawk]

If your computer is intended for just gaming then 32GB was a huge waste. 16GB at most is all you need even today let alone 2 years ago. games will not target such a tiny fraction of the market for years yet. It is highly unusual for a game to even utilize 8GB of ram, and Batman using 12GB is a major tech story because it is simply unheard of.

Chuckle

[nehumanuscrede]

More evidence for the " Wait till it's been out at least a year and it's $20 on Steam before picking it up " argument.

Never, ever pre-order anything. Ever.

I wouldn't even give a new game a serious look until at least six months have passed. For the sole purpose of ensuring the game is playable, the servers aren't overloaded ( if an online game ) and the majority of the game killing bugs are located and remedied.

My life isn't over if I don't get to play a game on release day. In fact, now that I think about it, my life is a whole lot less stressful if I wait and play it later.

Wolf3D, Doom, Quake...

[Dan East]

And here we come to the crux of what it means to be a truly great developer. Optimizations, both memory and performance, are difficult. Anyone can throw something together that is slow, bloated, and requires tons of physical resources to work half decently. Just like you can write anything you want in Visual Basic, because, after all, it is turing complete.

So this brings me to my subject - Wolf3D, Doom and Quake. What made those games amazing weren't the algorithms. Most of the concepts, like binary spacial partitioning, and the various 3D mathematics involved to translate and transform points, etc, have been around for close to a century now. What was amazing about those games is that they ran very well on the incredibly slow and RAM-limited hardware of the era. It took tremendous amounts of pre-processing and every trick in the book for those games to be lean and mean enough to not be a slideshow and have decent rendering quality.

Which brings us to the counter example of all of that: Batman: Arkham Knight.

Re:For what?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should try freeciv. It kicks ass.

Re:sod the bloody Bat-Man

[Anonymous Coward]

a Jesus-built hotrod

Well, ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long!

Windows 10 Demands 12GB RAM For Batman

[Thanatiel]

The way I see it, a big part of the problem here is the Window 10 bloatware.