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

[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.

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.