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

For what?

[Redbehrend]

Exactly for what do we need 12 gigs of ram? I had more issues with the code then I did graphics..... To me it still feels the same as the old engine I still scratch my head sometimes thinking what did they improve? Did this even help with the user experience?

Re:For what?

[__aaclcg7560]

Naughty bits. What else do you expect from Joker & Company?

Re:For what?

[Culture20]

They're probably loading everything into RAM all at once so there's no "loading, please wait" screen if you move through areas too quickly. HDD access can be a pain when you're throwing high resolution textures on every little mesh.

Re:For what?

[chipschap]

I think I'll just keep playing Civ I under DOSemu :)

Re:For what?

[gweihir]

Well, fortunately I returned my STEAM copy. Come to think of it, the Batmobil got on my nerves pretty soon in addition to the graphics breaking immersion all the time. Will not buy again. Well, maybe a $5 nice-price in a few years.

Re:For what?

[0123456]

Ditto. These days, I usually only buy games when they're $5 in a Steam sale.

Re:For what?

[tnk1]

A AAA game will never be in a humble bundle, and any reasonable sale price will take place after the game has been superseded long ago by something else as the new hotness.

Of course, based on your description, it doesn't sound like you'd get a AAA game at all. Fair enough, but they are very pretty, and often a lot of fun. Good dollar to entertainment ratio? Debatable, but if I play a $60 dollar game for a good 60 hours or more, I'm certainly doing better than I would with a movie.

As for 0-day and preorders? Yeah, that's just the same sort of thing that gets people in line for big movies. They don't want it spoiled, they want to get in on the "moment", and they want the new hotness *now*. There's a social effect there where they have been waiting for it, and all their friends are waiting for it. That's the the only time I have bought a game even close to 0-day: when I am either playing it with friends, or I want to be at the same place in the storyline.

Obviously, this is less of a concern for me as I get older.

Re:For what?

[DrXym]

There is a vast difference in the engine apparent the moment you stand on a rooftop and look out for miles in each direction, or where you walk through a door and the game keeps going instead of stopping at a load screen. Or when there is a cutscene and rather than play a video, the cutscene happens within the game. There are a few moments where there are transitions, e.g. going down a lift where its obviously loading up something but generally it feels seamless.

Re:For what?

[drinkypoo]

I think I'll just keep playing Civ I under DOSemu :)

I prefer Civ 2 on WinXP under vmware... (civ2 seems to punch lots of vms in the nuts, but not vmware.)

Re:For what?

[RichMan]

For the OS. The OS needs 8G. That leaves 4G for the game. Mostly textures and polygons.

Re:For what?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Instant gratification.

I don't understand how the PC gaming market works. You release a game that cost some $millions to produce, and you can't even get full price out of some customers.

I wonder how many problems, like day one DLC, micro transactions, etc, would go away if we were willing to pay the true cost of games development.

As gaming hardware improves, how can games dev be sustainable? We demand more graphical fidelity, richer, prettier assets, etc. Yet, sales numbers need to be ridiculously high to just break even. More than just PCs mind you, there's going to be at least one or two more console generation. Not mention mobile, which will never go away.

Either we need to pay more for games up front or there's going to be an economic calamity in games.

Which, fine by me. My favorite game series is done(not unless Kojima and Konami make up). I don't have a major desire for AAA games.

Re:For what?

[citizenr]

except textures are pretty shit, there are no high resolution textures in this game from PC point of view

Re:For what?

[ewibble]

Maybe I am missing something but do SSD have RPM, nothing spins in them, or has the metric just continued for comparison sake?

Re:For what?

[Quarters]

So how do you explain superior performance on consoles, then? And no, there isn't 11GBs worth of texture data difference between the PS4/XB1 and PC versions.

Re:For what?

[slaker]

Windows memory requirements haven't changed since Vista. Windows 10 actually runs surprisingly well on 1GB RAM and for most everyday purposes there's very little subjective need to have more than 4GB on any version of Windows right now.

Re:For what?

[mattack2]

A AAA game will never be in a humble bundle, and any reasonable sale price will take place after the game has been superseded long ago by something else as the new hotness.

The Mass Effect trilogy for $4.80 was quite a deal (on PSN). I don't care about "the new hotness". I'll just wait until it's the _old_ hotness, and get it inexpensively. I already have far far more games than I'll likely ever play.. But at these kinds of prices, I don't mind if I start it on easy and only play for a couple of hours. It's still way cheaper than a single movie, in terms of entertainment / time.

Re:For what?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Right, my point is that people bragging about buying PC games when they're cheap, bragging about how nice they look and wondering why anyone would pay retail fail to realize that those games cost money.

Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are all making profit right now.

All the GPU and CPU power in the world is nothing with out assets and engines to actually use all of that power. Building those engines and assets cost time and money in the form of human effort(procedural generation won't save the industry here; they still have to look nice and fit well into the environment).

So, tell me exactly how paying way less for games that require way more work is sustainable?

Like, League, and WoW and so on are an easy answer because it's basically SaaS, but more like GaaS. But what about anything else?

I just don't understand it.

Re:For what?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should try freeciv. It kicks ass.

Re:For what?

[0123456]

I grabbed that "deal". After about an hour into the first game, I realised that it sucked hard and haven't played it since.

Hmm, an hour into the game? So just past the first cut-scene, then?

Trust me, you're lucky you quit there, and didn't get as far as the second one.

Re:For what?

[hairyfeet]

Wow you haven't bought from the Humble Bundles lately, have you? There was the Origin Bundle, Deep Silver Bundle, the Capcom bundle just completed and yes Virginia they had a WB bundle with several of their titles.

As for zero day and preorders? I've found that AAA titles are released so damned buggy these days (see TFA for a perfect example) its better to just wait and get the GOTY edition which will give you all the preorder bonuses PLUS any expansions released PLUS it'll be patched and be running solid by that time. As for having you and your friends on the same page? That is what Steam sales are for, where many titles are offered in 4 packs so you and your friends can kick in together.

IMHO with the way these companies have outright lied and scammed players so damned many times you'd have to have a screw loose to trust them enough to preoder, again look at TFA or shite like DN Forever or Aliens: CM, anybody that preordered that crap ended up paying $60+ for a game they could have gotten for less than $20 just 2 weeks later. And its not like we PC gamers are hurting for games ATM, we have so many games to choose from that even if you just stick to the Steam,GOG, and Humble Bundle sales you'll quickly end up with more new games to play than you have hours in the day. I know myself and all of my friends have piles of games in our Steam libraries we have never even fired up, there are just so many good bundles and deals that you quickly end up with so many games you don't even know where to start.

Re:For what?

[kevmitch]

freeciv is light on resources, is roughly equivalent to civ 3 (well at least that's the last one I played) and it's even been ported to the web.

Re:For what?

[CronoCloud]

As I've said before on Slashdot, perhaps RAM type and internal bus speed matters more now. Those PS4's aren't running plain ordinary PC RAM but GDDR5 with fast internal busses backing it up. It may be the "big pipes/small pans vs small pipes/big pans" thing again.

http://archive.arstechnica.com...

This is probably the reason the PS3 and PS2 before it had RAMBUS RAM and fast internal busses (crazy 10 channel DMAC on the PS2) Maybe they made up a bit for deficiencies in how much RAM they had, becuase they could fill it and empty it faster than anything.

Re:For what?

[myster0n]

>A AAA game will never be in a humble bundle

Except there was the Humble Origin Bundle : http://blog.humblebundle.com/p... (there was even a second Origin bundle)
And the Humble THQ Bundle : http://blog.humblebundle.com/p...

Re:For what?

[jellomizer]

I am so angry, just like when Kings Quest 5 stopped supporting CGA Graphics cards!

Re:For what?

[Bert64]

Aside from there being less bloat on a console, the environment is also more predictable... You don't need to deal with crap running in the background, don't need to worry about different hardware and drivers etc... Consoles are much more efficient, so requiring 33% less ram is not unusual.

Re:For what?

[Bert64]

Also by the time you can buy a game on sale, it will already have gotten as many updates as it's going to, so it will either be bugfixed and playable or you'll know that its buggy and never going to get fixed so you can make an informed buying choice.

Re:For what?

[3.5 stripes]

Really? Most of my users are fairly happy with it, though it hasn't been rolled out everywhere. On an 8 GB i7 laptop it's running quite well.

Re:For what?

[gregthebunny]

Movies cost way more to make than video games and yet a brand new Blu-Ray release is usually only $15-$20. Games priced at $50 are a ripoff.

They're completely different forms of entertainment. Try looking at it from a dollars-per-hour-of-entertainment-value perspective. If I buy a Blu-ray for $20 and I watch the film (2-3 hours?) and all of the behind-the-scenes and bonus features (2-6 hours maybe?) then I've paid about $2-3 per hour of entertainment. If I buy a $60 game and I sink 100 hours into it, I'm paying less than $1 per hour for that entertainment. I can also continue to play many games in new and undiscovered ways which drives down the hourly cost even more. I can't keep watching a film in new and interesting ways. I can't mod a film to add entirely new content to the experience. When you look at it that way, it's the Blu-ray film that's the ripoff, not the game. Although I guess if you buy a game with less than 20-30 hours of gameplay and there's nothing else new to explore, then it might be the game that's a ripoff. But most games are not like that.

Re:For what?

[Coren22]

Personally, I wish that Steam made a way for you to delete games from your library so that searching for the next game wasn't a look through 10 years of game accumulation. I have over 100 games, many of them I will never touch again.

Re:For what?

[Coren22]

The person you are replying to has nearly no knowledge of computers, my guess is it is a troll.

Re:For what?

[phishybongwaters]

If I was guaranteed a working (defect free) product at launch I'd have no problem paying a little extra. The fact is, that's completely impossible with software, it really it. consoles are your best bet for launch issues (ignoring multiplayer server issues) because the consoles, with a few minor exceptions, are identical. They can safely code, and TEST, for that hardware setup and know that will be the setup their customers will be using. This doesn't work for PC or steambox gaming, you can't be sure what the hell the end user will have, and you simply can't plan for every possible situation, you go for the largest chunk of the audience and try to make them a good product. Why did COD cost so much? Licensing and paying for major actors. Did this at all fix the code issues that have been present for the past several games in the series? Nope. Did it provide a better product at launch? Nope. Did it really add ANYTHING of value to the game? Nope. It's not about paying less, it's about paying a fair price. 60$ for a broken game that isn't actually complete until about a year later is not ok. (battlefield 4). Pre-ordering gives the game company no incentive to have a working product at launch, you already paid! They can literally have steam install an icon that loads nothing and call it a launch, you've already paid. I don't feel that the price of their over the top marketing campaign should be worked into the price of the game at the expense of a quality product. This isn't to say the industry is at fault. We are all at fault, we demand new games, improved everything, and we want it yesterday. You mention building engines. Ok, we've got unreal, frostbite and maybe a few others. No one builds engines, they LICENSE them. So no, the research and development of a new engine doesn't count, none of this matters if the end product is a pile of crap. Why is the digital copy of (insert game here) 59$ and the physical copy is 62$? Isn't the whole appeal of digital that there's no manufacturing, no physical media, no shipping or packaging, merely storage space and bandwidth? Why are these reduced costs not being passed to the customer? Maybe I'm jaded but I've been burned one too many times paying full price for what amounts to a beta test. At least minecraft and day Z were honest and told you this was alpha/beta software. EA/DICE/SONY/SEGA don't seem to care.

Re:For what?

[jeremyp]

Works for me.

Are you one of these luddites who disables Javascript?

Re:For what?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Big Hollywood movies tend to have a theatrical run which is the bulk of the returns on investment.

When that BluRay is in your hand, most of the money for the film has been made back when it was running in the theaters.

Games priced at $50 bucks need to sell more copies than a Blu Ray of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Not only that, but there's different support costs for a Blu Ray than there are for games. Game has an online component? That costs a ton of money to upkeep.

So, either games are going to have to be not as pretty as console versions, or PC gamers are going to have to put their money where their mouths are with regards to paying for prettier content.

Re:For what?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

You mention building engines. Ok, we've got unreal, frostbite and maybe a few others. No one builds engines, they LICENSE them.

Konami built the Fox Engine, Treyarch built the Frostbite engine, CryEngine... etc.

Why are these reduced costs not being passed to the customer?

3 bucks sounds about right when you take manufacturing out of the picture. It doesn't cost more than a few dollars to put a disk into a box and send the box to the store.

Like complaining about paying full price for broken games IS an issue I'm on board with. Because fuck that. That's a huge problem in the industry.

But when PC gamers complain that their games are crippled for consoles, then balk at paying full price, then I have zero sympathy for PC gamers. I don't care about someone's system specs, they are aware that it takes more time and money to make a texture that looks nice at 4k versus one that looks nice at 1080p right?

Maybe I'm just playing the right games, the last few games I've bought have been Metal Gear Solid 5(aside from that whackass save bug with Quiet), Splatoon, and Smash Bros. So, maybe I'm just not that hardcore of a gamer anymore? I don't know.

Re:For what?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Depends on the game.

GTA 5? 137 million in development costs. Metal Gear Solid 5? 80 million. Destiny? 140 million.

Triple A games hitting the 50 to 100 million in development cost mark isn't uncommon, which is right along the same cost as a hollywood film.

Re:For what?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

FWIW, I don't give a toss about marketing budgets too much.

Maybe GTA V wouldn't have sold the way it did if it wasn't for the fact that billboards and busses were wrapped with GTA V ads and so on, but...

Re:For what?

[lucien86]

You don't understand the purchase model for PC games. - It is pretty complicated, it's a very big, complicated, and segregated market..
Basically most AAA and other games have a sales lifecycle where they either make the money back or not. By the time a game hits Humble Bundle or other budget resellers the game is already effectively dead, so selling it for a very cheap price is no huge loss. And despite the low costs per game, studios can actually still make a bit more money off of it. It also means that more people get exposed to the game, which can act as free marketing for the studios more recent games and for any newer sequels..

When it comes to AAA games, the cost to make one game runs from about $150,000 to about $10 to 20 million. The total PC games market (I'm guessing) for most AAA games is a maximum of about 20 million to 150 million machines. That means that a really hot seller can make a studio in the region of about a billion dollars or more. Most flops will struggle to break even or will make a loss. I think that most of the big studios work on a principle of about three to one - they need about 1 really hot seller for every 3 to 4 flops..
Some studios focus on making only chains of poor quality games that sell as flops but with low enough production costs to always stay in profit. This is why most licence based or tie-in games are of such poor quality, slapped out as cheaply and quickly as possible to milk the licence movie or TV series or whatever for whatever its worth..
AAA Console games of course can be even more profitable - with a very high set price per unit game, better anti-piracy protection, a mostly very un-savvy and gullible user base, and a global market of up to something like 500 million machines..

Re:For what?

[mattack2]

I'm not very far into it, but I think what people rave about is the interaction between you & the NPCs, the backstory.

Re:For what?

[Pseudonym]

Exactly for what do we need 12 gigs of ram?

Batcomputer emulator.

Re:For what?

[Pseudonym]

Also it doesn't cost $50 to see a film at the cinema [...]

It probably doesn't apply to you, but thanks to the Australia Tax, it's pretty close to that for a modest-sized family.

[Technology Reqest #37,395] Need 12GB RAM

[Culture20]

I demand 12GB of RAM now that I have upgraded the Bat-Computer to Windows 10.

-Batman

Re:[Technology Reqest #37,395] Need 12GB RAM

[cfalcon]

"Batman is Bruce Wayne: How Windows 10 Telemetry Helped the FBI Capture This Notorious Vigilante"

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

[Chas]

You have to love Bat-spaghetti.

Re:Another example of bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to be honest... get with the times.

I have 56GB of RAM spread between the three laptops sitting around me currently, none of which is less than 3 years old at this point. 16GB, 16GB, and 24GB.

Total cost for all that RAM? About $300, at $50/DIMM for the 8GB sticks and I had the two 4GB sticks as they came with two of the laptops when purchased and one of the laptops could support 4 sticks instead of only 2 like most. And these aren't top-end gaming laptops either, one I picked up used for $250, one is a cheap Dell work issued me, and the third is the most powerful at being a ThinkPad W530 but is still modest by most standards.

And that's not counting the 8-year-old laptop I have in the other room, even that has 8GB of RAM in it.

Am I excusing them dropping an UE3 game requiring 12GB of RAM specifically for Windows 10? No. This reeks of something funky in their code and them giving up on trying to fix it so they just shove it out the door with this new requirement.

But seriously... developers should be able to expect >4GB of RAM on any computer made this decade, and stop being afraid of stamping 64-bit as a requirement.

- WolfWings, still too damn lazy to login to /.

Re:Another example of bloat

[crusher-1]

Ya, that all makes sense and one would assume a given. However, that would take more man hours and the devs would likely have to actually spend some time writing code, rather than just cut/paste chunks in and write a few lines to tweak or bridge (not that they couldn't do it - would just mean more resource allocation). This push it out the door as soon as possible and patch later paradigm (old and tired) is lately coming around to smack them in the face for the reasons you point out. The project managers and department heads push this agenda - generally in response to the sting on their backs from the board room cracking their whips and demanding a product that generates revenues before the close of the next fiscal quarter. Not much one can do in this event until the culture in the board room changes is my take... Just my $ 0.02 worth.

Re:Another example of bloat

[crusher-1]

Case in point: EA and Battlefield 4.

Re: Another example of bloat

[0123456]

Just optimised and unbloated I think.

No, crippled. Most games aren't even 64-bit on Windows.

Even with a two-year-old PC, games barely use my CPU and barely use my RAM. They could do far more interesting stuff with modern hardware, if they weren't built for consoles with a fraction of the power.

Re:Another example of bloat

[techno-vampire]

But seriously... developers should be able to expect >4GB of RAM on any computer made this decade, and stop being afraid of stamping 64-bit as a requirement.

I can't argue with that, considering that most computers today come with 8GB RAM and a 64-bit OS. I won't say that we'll never see 12GB as the standard, but for the time being, they should be writing games for what people have now, not for what they may have ten or fifteen years in the future.

Re:Another example of bloat

[Comen]

This game ran great on my XBOX ONE console. I game mostly on my PC with a GTX780ti. But I take my XBOX ONE with my when I got on vacation and this year played Batman and this game is truly amazing looking and played great on the XBOX. I was amazed at how well the game let me drive the Bat Mobile around the city so fast and never had a stutter or slow down really.

Re:Another example of bloat

[chihowa]

I agree. My gaming PC from 2009 has 16 GB of RAM that sits empty while the games slowly load assets from the spinning disc at preset intervals/locations. (Loading...) The CPU sits idling while the (single threaded, 32bit) AI process makes sure not to use any of it to make better behaving enemies/NPCs.

The only thing that is even remotely improving is the graphics, but my two seven year old middle-grade GPUs still let me play everything all maxed out.

Everything seems to be made for consoles and refuses to even take advantage of the extra capabilities of better hardware. At the very least, with more free RAM than the entire game's assets, I should never have to see an inter-level loading screen again (SSDs help, but maybe I should set up a RAM disk).

Re:Another example of bloat

[0123456]

To be fair, the second time I load a game, it's faster, as all the files are cached in RAM. But the fscking thing still makes me wait while it plays half a dozen stupid videos, so it doesn't make that much difference.

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

[mrprogrammerman]

Their doing their part to increase PC sales. How else can you increase new PC games without having software that requires the newest and fastest hardware?

Re:Another example of bloat

[Darinbob]

I agree. They do test on smaller machines, but only at the end of the development cycle. Basically they're marketing to the sorts of people who spend $300 on graphics cards and who get a new machine every other year.

Re:Another example of bloat

[somenickname]

At the very least, you'd think that *someone* within the company had a machine that represented minimum or recommended specs. And hopefully those people would test the game on those machines before they released it. You could even have an entire department devoted to doing this. You could call it something like "the quality assurance department".

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.

Re:Another example of bloat

[Fragnet]

Spot on. At work I develop with a mid-range PC. That's the baseline. At home it's a different matter of course.

Re:Another example of bloat

[PopeRatzo]

while the games slowly load assets from the spinning disc

Dude, it's 2015. You can get one of those fancy SSD drives for like $50. If you have game that's spinning your platters, load it on the SSD.

Re:Another example of bloat

[techno-vampire]

Yes, that's how it should be done. In this case, it looks as though the specs were decided by the devs, and QA had no choice but to go along.

Re:Another example of bloat

[thegarbz]

Why would you be trying to fill up your RAM? There's only so much RAM you can use at any given instance to render any given object on the screen. What do you get by having a game use that much? Insane load times? Heavy CPU loading? A bottlenecked PCI bus endlessly trying to push data back and forth from the graphics card because there's so much of it? Or maybe you want a game to cache to ram and load while you play directing resources away from the task of rendering your graphics just so you can get past your next load screen a bit faster?

But hey here we have a perfect example, a game that uses a LOT of RAM and runs like shit while really offering very little in the way of improvements over previous releases.

Re:Another example of bloat

[JohnStock]

That's an extremely simplistic and outdated view.

Re:Another example of bloat

[gbjbaanb]

and to look at the Steam Survey, only 14% of PCs have 12+ gig. 20% don't even have 4Gb.

Re:Another example of bloat

[JoeMerchant]

Since when is 12GB RAM unusual for a new game?

New games have always stretched older machines. Most anything bought in the last 4 years or so can be equipped with 16GB RAM or more, if you just fork out the $$$.

Re:Another example of bloat

[Nemyst]

Except those devs overwhelmingly build with a single target in mind: consoles. They use devkits to work and do all of their testing and iterating on it. Sorry, you're flat out wrong.

The real reason for shit like this is that publishers hand off the porting job to random crappy devs and give them untenable deadlines to do it.

Re:Another example of bloat

[Cito]

My gaming PC is pretty nice, although it's time to upgrade the graphics card.

Intel Core I7 8 core 3.6ghz overclocked to 4ghz with a corsair water cooler

32 gigs ram, low latency "gaming" ram

320 gig Solid State hard drive as the system "boot" drive

2TB Western Digital Black Hard drive for gaming/installs.

EVGA FTW Edition GTX 670 (the ftw editions are factory overclocked)

I haven't had ANY issues with any games Yet, but I know that graphics card needs upgrading soon.

but Witcher 3 on max I get 80 fps average, with some ups and some downs based on where im at.

Grand Theft Auto 5 I get that solid 60 fps at max settings, with the vsync and such.

Ive stayed on windows 7 though.

Re: Another example of bloat

[bill_mcgonigle]

> What do you get by having a game use that much?

You get to go to a 12-week "coding bootcamp" and write games. No bullshit wastes-of-time like learning how to write an efficient double-buffering routine. Just the exciting parts (and then you get to work 90-hour weeks).

Re:Another example of bloat

[enjar]

I built the PC I am typing this on in 2012. 16 GB of RAM was $79 back then. The motherboard was $89, made by Intel and can support 32 GB RAM. It has USB 3.0, as well. The entire PC was built for something like $650.

Sure it didn't have a screaming GPU or an i7, but I can add that later if I want. The bottom line is that my $650 PC build quite easily included 16 GB of RAM for less than $100, in a consumer grade motherboard. It's not outlandish.

Re:Another example of bloat

[somenickname]

Possibly. Or management decided to ship it over the objections of all the technical people involved (both developers and QA). It's hard to say. But, I do 100% agree with your original post. If you develop on cutting edge hardware, you are highly likely to produce something that needs that cutting edge hardware. I even have experience doing this: Many moons ago I convinced my boss to get me a $50k Sun workstation to develop some visualization software. I worked at Sun so, internally, that wasn't a big deal but, the resulting software basically needed that $50k Sun workstation to run. It was a good lesson to learn.

These days I develop on whatever hardware happens to be sitting on my desk (or lap) and just send the job out to a bonkers powerful build server (or cluster) for compiling if that's a bottleneck in the development process.

Re:Another example of bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, list some other games that have a 12GB RAM or higher requirement. We'll be waiting. Then you can explain what the tern "unusual" means.

Re:Another example of bloat

[CanadianMacFan]

Oh it's not just developers and their workstations. Give a development team access to a high speed network and they soon forget that other people aren't always accessing the website over a fast connection so you end up with bloated graphics, videos, any other files. Never mind trying to get developers to remember that your site has an international audience that includes poorer countries with bad connections and not always the best of computers. (I've had to remind the makers of a couple government websites of this fact.)

Re:Another example of bloat

[Dutch Gun]

Yep, there's something to be said about that. I've been on the opposite end, though. You see, devs have to run the game in debug mode. If you don't have cutting edge machines, you can barely play the game and debug it at the same time. I've worked at a studio where we had very middle of the road machines, and the problem is that for a large portion of the dev schedule, the game is slow even in release mode. It's inefficient to optimize code while it's still being changed on a daily basis. You have to do that closer to the end of the production cycle. So, yes, the game we released was very well optimized, but it came at the cost of a lot of dev pain and frustration. I think the proper solution is, as you indicated, is to have shared min-spec test machines for the team.

Of course, the real trick is that optimization is not just a function of code alone, something many people don't consider. It's a function of code + geometry + texture sizes + shader complexity, and depending on the PC specs, any or all of those could be causing a bottleneck. So, you need to make sure the artists don't go overboard with poly, texture, and shader counts. But there's no "magic limits" you can really tell them... you can just try to set some rough guidelines, but those are only estimates, because the environments and characters are built many months before the engine is in decent shape (assuming you're building your own, or heavily modifying one). If your estimate is off in the final months, it's a mad scramble to try to cull assets or simplify shaders, assuming you can't get more perf from code optimization.

I'm not trying to excuse the devs. There's no excuse for a buggy, poor performing game. And the management has to take a hit for knowingly releasing the game well before it was ready. I'm just saying game optimization / performance targets is a very complicated issue from the dev side.

Re:Another example of bloat

[unrtst]

My gaming PC is pretty nice, although it's time to upgrade the graphics card. ...
EVGA FTW Edition GTX 670 (the ftw editions are factory overclocked)
I haven't had ANY issues with any games Yet, but I know that graphics card needs upgrading soon.

That card is (easily) in the top 27 (http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html - the GTX 670, not overclocked, is #27).
What would you even upgrade to? Above that, most of the prices are crazy high, though the GTX 970, at $315, may be worth considering, if you happen to get some games that it would help at all, and it's worth that much for a little bit better graphics on those select games. Just curious... why do you think it's time to upgrade?

Re:Another example of bloat

[cfalcon]

It's pronounced "xbone"

Re:Another example of bloat

[cfalcon]

12GB is absolutely unusual for any game. Insanely so, considering that:

> It doesn't need 12GB with Windows 7, Microsoft's final OS.
> It doesn't need 12GB on the PS4, the top end console
> It doesn't need 12GB on the Xbone, Microsoft's current Wii-U competitor

Additionally, I play a decent number of games, and I don't have 12GB on my computer. Most have requirements substantially lower than that. Normally I play games on one monitor, voice chat on one monitor, and have two browsers with a couple dozen tabs up. A game that requires 12GB to run dedicated is like, a holodeck or something.

We probably won't have a legit game with a system requirement of 12GB until 2020 or something.

Re:Another example of bloat

[inasity_rules]

It runs fine in 64bit under linux.

Re:Another example of bloat

[Xest]

They don't seem to have much of a problem on consoles where it works fine.

No idea why they're struggling so hard with the PC version.

Re:Another example of bloat

[dunkelfalke]

That actually surprises me. I have run into RAM problems trying to run Stalker Clear Sky with 4GB (with the swap file disabled, though), and it has been a while since the game came out.

Re:Another example of bloat

[AmiMoJo]

My PC has 32GB of RAM so that I don't have to shut stuff down to do other stuff. I can load up a game without bothering to kill off VMs (just pause them), close my IDEs, web browser etc.

Re:Another example of bloat

[chihowa]

A $50 SSD isn't going to hold more than a few games at a time, which means I'll be spending my time moving games between drives every time I want to play something different.

I'm not flush with free time and I play games to unwind. It's much less relaxing to have to implement workarounds for problems that should be handled by the games themselves. If I'm going to do that, I might as well just go the RAM disk route like I said in the original post.

Re:Another example of bloat

[PopeRatzo]

A $50 SSD isn't going to hold more than a few games at a time, which means I'll be spending my time moving games between drives every time I want to play something different.

Most games run fine off a regular hard drive. Just keep the SSD for when you have a game that requires tons of loading like this stupid game about the Bat-Man.

Re:Another example of bloat

[del_diablo]

And how will anything use that 32GB? At most you can use a RAMDISK, to speed up loading. Even outside of that, the trend of uncompressed assets and huge FMV files ruins that opportunity for newer games.
The other problem is one of scale. If high end hardware can only run 1 billion polygons on screen, that sets a hard cap for how much data you can use of RAM. And 5-6 Billion polygons isn't a lot of space, since its going to be compressed anyhow. Textures runs into limitations like shader passes and cost of using textures.
At some point in the GB range of RAM, the diminish returns exist, and i think we won't see anything go there until the next generations of consoles, unless they also hit diminishing returns.

Re:Another example of bloat

[Coren22]

Wow, GB? Is this a post from 1990?

They sell Multi TB SSDs now, but they will cost as much as a top of the line video card.

Re:Another example of bloat

[Coren22]

Perhaps this is more a problem with your configuration. Disabling the swap file on a system with 4 GB of ram is begging for the system to crash instead of swapping out memory not in use.

You should not run with no swap file at 4 GB, at 32 GB, sure, as you will never swap, but at 4 GB, the OS is swapping.

Re:Another example of bloat

[Coren22]

I still run my gaming PC on a 500 series nVidia, no game stresses it. If you think you need more than that, I have to ask, WHY?

Re:Another example of bloat

[Yunzil]

I have 8 GB in my system with Windows 10 and Arkham Knight runs fine. But I also have a 980Ti and all SSDs, so YMMV.

Re:Another example of bloat

[AdamStarks]

Consoles are a known hardware platform, which lets you make various optimizations that are impossible in a PC environment (e.g. usage of Placement Textures).

Re:Another example of bloat

[KingMotley]

My gaming PC from 2012 has 64GB. I usually just create a 32GB-ish ramdisk (depending on game) and run whatever game I'm playing from there.

Re:Another example of bloat

[KingMotley]

I sold my Revo 3 x2 (which is exactly what you describe) about 3 years ago for $500ish, which I think I bought for $700ish. You can get 1TB drives for cheap now -- $329 http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-...

Re:Another example of bloat

[desdinova 216]

they still test?

Re:Another example of bloat

[JoeMerchant]

If you don't want to mess with it, fine, leave it alone. God knows I've never been interested in building a Crysis system.

I play plenty of games on systems with 4GB of RAM and Intel embedded graphics, but I don't go whining when one won't work - that's just not a game for me to play on my NUC that drives the living room PC - and I think it's the game Dev's loss more than mine, I've got plenty to keep me entertained without their stuff.

But - if these devs solved their performance problems with a $50 RAM upgrade, that's damn cheap compared to the graphics cards that have been "required" over the years.

12GB of RAM costs less today than a damn sound card cost back in the 90s. If it means getting the game to market 3 months faster, I'd say it's a good trade - if they think it's worth optimizing to make it work (well) on 8GB later, that's their call. More likely they'll move on to develop something else instead.

Re:Another example of bloat

[Cito]

On I thought maybe the 670 was getting a little "old"

I just run the 1 evga ftw 670

But you're right, I've not had any problems at all on new games.

I just felt since the 700 series to 900 series now Titans are out I started feeling my 670 "sounded old"

Not that I'm upgrading real soon, I was thinking I might have to upgrade in the near future, but I'd like that 900 card but I'm not paying that price this soon, when I got my 670 ftw edition I paid lie 400+ but it was new the first of the 700s just came out when I got the 670

I guess I'll be OK then for a while longer on the 670

Thanks

Re:Another example of bloat

[Cito]

It's true I've had no game give me trouble. I just felt after the 700 series up to 900 series now the Titans, I felt my evga 670 ftw edition was about 4 generations old , but I'm still gonna wait until prices drop before I get a 900 series.

My Linux box I use as a file server/torrent box I put my old nvidia 9800 evga in it for better Xwin but I don't really use Xwin much the Linux fileserver has 6 hdds inside and 4 external hard 3 USB and 1 esata, all drives shared on LAN so I can stream movies to tablet, raspberry pi on LCD by bed, etc ;-)

My family never knows what to get me for christmas or birthday so i say cant go wrong with external usb or esata hdd. So now i got 4! Lol

Re:Another example of bloat

[tompaulco]

You obviously didn't play any Early Access games on Steam after 2014 on.

I don't even know what an Early Access game is, so you would be correct on that score.

Re:Another example of bloat

[bloodhawk]

Then it isn't just a game machine if you are running VM's and IDE's, so 32GB or even more actually makes sense. I have 128GB on my gaming machine, but I also do dev work and run VM's on it. If I was building a purely gaming machine I would not go above 16GB as it just isn't worth it.

Re:Another example of bloat

[Coren22]

Who needs 4 TB for anything but video storage? Why would you buy a 4 TB SSD?

Re:Another example of bloat

[Coren22]

Frankly, if you are going for 4 TB, you are likely using a desktop, because who would need that much storage on a laptop? In that case, you can get 2 2TB Samsung drives for $2000, so that would be a way better way to go. Most of us though only need 1 TB max, and may even be able to use .5 TB to get by as games aren't really that large yet.

Holy ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... sloppy programming, Batman!

W10

[turkeydance]

is a caveat.

Two things I thought when I got my PC

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Sweet! 4 gigs of RAM.
2. How long until that's not enough?

Re:Two things I thought when I got my PC

[Cito]

"640K of Ram should be enough for everybody"

-old quote on top of Slashdot page, making fun of a misquote, when it was ran as a hobby enjoyment before it sold out literally and figuratively.

dammit now Ive made myself sad, with nostalgia back to late 1997-2000 Slashdot

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.

Re: Chuckle

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to pre-order Fallout 4 in a few day. Try and stop me, Batman! Hahahahahahahahahahaaaaaa

Re:Chuckle

[tepples]

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.

That's a viable tactic, so long as it's not a league-licensed sports game and not from a publisher that likes to shut down the online matchmaking servers after a couple years.

Re:Chuckle

[zAPPzAPP]

I only preorder to reward past outstanding work (which I bought for cheap on steam), as a way to give something back.
So far it mostly was a solid strategy.

Of course due to backlog I never play on release day either, often when the game price finally goes down to budget it still sits untouched in the library.
So maybe I shouldnt buy any more games at all...

Re:Chuckle

[will_die]

Or check the various key sell sites. Got Batman with the season pass for around $30 during the time they were fixing it.
Besides those rare times I am of the same mind. Let other pay for the game I'll pick it up in the next holiday sale. Until then I am playing all the games I got during the last holiday sale.

lol

[Freeman-Jo]

lol at gamemaker, software fix=upgrade your hardware.

Memory?

[msauve]

Batman is multimillionaire Bruce Wayne. He can stop demanding, and buy his own damn Bat-RAM.

Re:12G - that's all?

[danbob999]

While I agree with you, PC manufacturers didn't get the memo. They are still stuck with 4GB, or maybe 8GB on high end PCs. RAM prices didn't help us avoiding that plateau. RAM was cheaper 3 years ago than it is now.

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:Wolf3D, Doom, Quake...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a 3d artist, and I've worked in the games industry along with many others.

You're not wrong. But those days are over. Modern college graduates from art schools have what can only be described as rudimentary spelling skills. The management is run by MBA's who will tell you with a straight face that 9 women can have a baby in a month. The love of the game and optimization, is gone. No 1 person in any modern game company has the overall expansive INTJ masterminding that Carmack and others had back in the day. It's gone.

They made their own engines, which 90% of game companies have neither the time, patience, budget, or experience to do. It's easy to slap some shit into UnrealEd and get going, so easy in fact that it's a no brainer for most.

Even Quake 4 didn't live up to the dreamy cleanness that was Quake 3.

Re:Wolf3D, Doom, Quake...

[thegarbz]

Optimizations, both memory and performance, are difficult.

Not difficult, but tedious and time consuming, something directly at odds with deadlines and performance KPIs pushed by management. It's not about being a truly great developer, it's about being given the opportunity to be a truly great developer.

Re:Wolf3D, Doom, Quake...

[Snotnose]

Optimizations, both memory and performance, are difficult.

And typically take older, more experienced (read: $$$$) folks to do right. H1-Bs need not apply.

Re:Wolf3D, Doom, Quake...

[Anonymous Coward]

Took me a long time to realize your later statement. Wasted almost a decade on learning how to write efficient code. How the underlying system interprets and acts upon that code. What parts of the underlying system could be leverage to make it even more efficient. As well as all the very advanced mathematics that comes with writing highly efficient code. It was all for naught.

I pull out the math to convert between color spaces accurately on-the-fly and works on older SM2.0 machines. The other guy pulls out a LUT that requires 3D textures and a boatload of memory. I point out that my math catches the spots in-between their 3D texture's samples, they point out they can even further restrict the possible user base by using linear interpolation across the 3D texture.

It's so damn wasteful that it sickens me how much power we're wasting on inefficient algorithms for no other reason than the sake of using them. It's not like they even have to invent the hardcore optimized algorithms, after all guys like me that enjoy writing them also enjoy sharing them.

Re:Wolf3D, Doom, Quake...

[sad_]

take of your pink-retro-glasses, those games were pushing the HW to the max when they came out.
who could play them at full screen? only folks who had the latest 386, 486 (doom) or pentium (quake).

Re:Wolf3D, Doom, Quake...

[Nadir]

You mention Mode X and a single segment: that is not entirely correct. The original VGA had 256KB of RAM and Mode X used a "planar" approach with a single byte affecting 4 pixels.

Re:Wolf3D, Doom, Quake...

[Megol]

Doom ran in 32 bit mode too? Segment addressing were no problem, the framebuffer was addressable as 64kiB at 0xA0000 by default. I don't know what you mean by "Data was packed into 16-bit values", are you talking about internal structures in Doom?

"Mode X" is the unchained 320x240 mode with square pixels using a planar layout, making the whole 256kiB VGA address space available. Horizontal: pixel 0 => plane 0, pixel 1 => plane 1, pixel 2 => plane 2, pixel 3 => plane 3, pixel 4 => plane 0, pixel 5 => plane 1 etc. Each plane was 64kiB in size so 256kiB in total. Getting good performance from unchained 256 color modes wasn't easy and essentially reduced to trying to avoid changing the active plane.

The 320x200 mode was more efficient for some types of rendering but had the disadvantage that it only used 64000 bytes of the video memory, the framebuffer address n mapped to plane n&3, address n>>2 as viewed by the CPU. This meant doublebuffering wasn't possible, the alternative was rendering in a memory buffer and then copy to the framebuffer.

Re:Wolf3D, Doom, Quake...

[Viewsonic]

I'm not sure if I'm agreeing with you or not. But Wolf3D, Doom 1/2, and Quake all required top of the line PCs at the time. These games didn't run on anything considered average back then. These games in particular DROVE the industry to release faster chips. When Doom was released, most people had a 386, and it would run, in a tiny frame. But those who owned 486s, they could play it reasonably fine. When Doom 2 came out, it would play "okay" on a 486/33 but it really shined on a 486/66 which was out of reach for most people, and certainly out of reach for the 386 users. I remember saving forever to finally get a 486 dx4 100mhz and it played Doom 2 and Descent as awesome as you could expect. It was top of the line. The very first Pentiums were just being introduced.

Then Quake alpha came out. You needed a Pentium. The DX 4 100 couldn't play it for crap. Soon after the 3D card market exploded, again, thanks in part to iD Software.

So, seeing a game such as Batman wanting top of the line might not be ordinary today, but back then, every big game demanded it.

Not a bad thing

[twistedcubic]

If this lowers the price of RAM, then I'm all for it! Even better if they claim it needs 12GB of ECC.

Re:12GB?

[crusher-1]

When I built mine I planned on the max - 32GB. If it would have taken 64, that's what i'd have put in. If you like to game - it's kinda a given that you max your ram at the highest stable speed the Mobo will allow. Not crazy at all IMHO.

So what?

[ClickOnThis]

Bruce Wayne can afford 12 GB and then some. His superpower is money.

Solves one mystery at least

[Applehu Akbar]

So that's why I keep seeing the Crucial logo projected on clouds with searchlights.

Re: Oh, fine

[Anonymous Coward]

That's simply not true. The basic functionality (cmd.exe, telemetry and NSA reporting) works fine with just 4Gb.

Batman is looking kinda pudgy.....

[TiggertheMad]

I am really curious what it is they are cashing in local RAM that is so big - Are they staging textures and models to local ram before pushing them onto the GPU? Media resources are the only thing that really bloats up a game's size, game physics and AI rules are usually pretty small.I suspect that the parent post is correct, in that the devs are kinda being lazy and not lazy loading assets on demand and just dumping everything into RAM on level load.

May John C. come save us from bad game coders, amen.

Wait a minute

[Cro Magnon]

Is this Batman? Or Fatman?

Re:12GB?

[Arkh89]

Yeah, but having a lot of RAM means that you also have plenty of space for cache and that's very comfortable.

Now go check out x-plane

[Ice Tiger]

When you want to run high detail photo terrain and UHD meshes. My next PC will have at least 32GB of RAM

Just another example...

[dristoph]

...of how out of touch the billionaire class is with the average American. Bruce Wayne should be ashamed.

obligatory XKCD - Cutting Edge

[williamyf]

https://xkcd.com/606/

Re: obligatory XKCD - Cutting Edge

[williamyf]

You know /. supports hyperlinks you asshat.

I decided my brain power is better spent researching to decide that Leaf-Spine with 802.1aq is better than Leaf-Spine with TRILL, and yet both are better than Core-Distribution-Access, or Submitting things that make it to the front page, or making meaningful comments than learning how to put hyperlinks in Slashdot in some arcane old fashioned way because they rather do BETA than give us a decent WYSIWYG editor...

Or some troll can not do triple click Flower+c Flower+v ... Just saying.

8K of Bat-RAM

[tepples]

buy his own damn Bat-RAM.

In fact, that's exactly what Sunsoft did for Batman: Return of the Joker for NES. It comes with 8K of Bat-RAM on top of the 4K built into the NES it runs on.

Windows 10 is heavier

[tepples]

Or perhaps the game uses the entire 8 GB of a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One console's RAM and needs 12 GB on PC because Windows 10 is so much heavier than Orbis OS on PS4 or whatever Microsoft calls the XbOne's operating system.

Re:Windows 10 is heavier

[CronoCloud]

I've said something like that before, about how the PS4 doesn't have to keep a printer queue or other services running.

But it might also it's the SPEED of the RAM and the speed of the internal busses The PS4 isn't running standard PC RAM, but much faster GDDR5 with some fast internal busses enabling the thing to transfer data internally very very quickly. The PS2 and PS3 before it, also had comparitvely fast RDRAM and XDR DRAM respectively as well as fast internal busses.

Things have changed

[AndyKron]

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fit on a 5.25" floppy.

Re:Things have changed

[SuiteSisterMary]

Shit, Optimius Prime fit onto a damn floppy disk.

Ug.. no, it's not really

[rsilvergun]

It's just really, really hard to plan. It takes several years to develop a game. Meanwhile computer hardware is advancing. You're trying hard to hit that moving target. You don't write your game for the computer your users have today, you write it for the computer they're going to have when your game launches. Monolith got hit hard by this. They developed Shogo Mobile Armor division thinking by then everyone would have PII 300s while lots of us were stuck on 200 MMXs. Their games got bad reviews until hardware caught up with their engine. Even John Romero and the Duke Forever guys suffered from this problem. If you're not writing games for a console you're job is 100 times harder.

sod the bloody Bat-Man

[PopeRatzo]

If you want a game where you play a surly dude who runs around an open world kicking ass, go get Shadow of Mordor on Steam right now. It's on sale for like $17, and instead of a gay Batmobile, you get to hop on the backs of these giant beasts and behead orcs to your heart's content. And the first time you take out a warlord, you'll stand up, grab your balls and do your best Macho Man Randy Savage voice, yelling, "I did that thing. Oh yeah." With the money you'll save, you can buy a pizza and a case of beer.

Trust me. Don't let this Arkham Knight make you feel like you're some trick who was robbed before the panties dropped. Go play Shadow of Mordor, or if you're the sort that needs the self-affirmation of paying full price for a game, get Mad Max and you can blast around the Wasteland in a Jesus-built hotrod and kick ass.

And you won't need five fucking Cray supercomputers configured in a Beowulf cluster to play those other games. Take control of your PC gaming life for god's sake and quit sniveling.

https://youtu.be/8C4lK41SX-Q

Re:sod the bloody Bat-Man

[PopeRatzo]

yeah, hopping on the backs of giant beasts and blasting around isn't gay...

Not the way I do it, it isn't.

Re:sod the bloody Bat-Man

[Anonymous Coward]

a Jesus-built hotrod

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

Re:sod the bloody Bat-Man

[SuiteSisterMary]

Seconded. I remember people were marveling at the time about what a wonderfully polished PC version it had, while Arkham Origins still has issues with vastly overspeced PCs.

Re:12G - that's all?

[ravenscar]

I agree. If you're in the PC gaming crowd you generally know you're in for the regular upgrade cycle. My gaming rig had 16GB years ago.

That's why I got out of PC gaming and moved to the console (sacrilege I know). I just found that I didn't enjoy constantly upgrading and tinkering with my machine. Don't get me wrong, I loved it for many years and learned a ton in the process. I just have other ways I'd rather spend my time and money these days. Now, if my kid ever gets into gaming...

DRM

[jmccue]

real memory -- game uses 2gig ram, DRM 10gig ram

Re:Firefox

[0123456]

You mean 4 GB?

No. By default, Windows caps 32-bit applications at 2GB.

This is one reason heavily-modded 32-bit games crash a lot.

Oh dear oh dear

[DrXym]

So Batman doesn't need 12GB but its recommended to avoid paging. What should we make of this other than the fact that if you turn all the settings up to max it needs a lot of memory.

Re:Oh dear oh dear

[thegarbz]

Make of it what it is, max settings or not the game had insanely high requirements for graphics which haven't improve by any significant margin to justify it. Add to that the poor performance only on one platform and the only limits you see being pushed are how cheap and fast a company can poorly port a game to PC.

Re:Oh dear oh dear

[DrXym]

I guess you haven't played the game if you see no improvements in the graphics. It's one of the best looking games there is on the PC at present.

Re:Oh dear oh dear

[thegarbz]

And yet it doesn't look that much better than the previous versions, or other games on like Assassins Creed Syndicate. Somehow it also looks the same on other platforms yet they don't have a paging problem and they definitely don't have 12GB of RAM.

Anyway you cut it, the RAM requirement is not justified by the quality of the graphics.

Re:Oh dear oh dear

[DrXym]

Then you're not looking very closely. The game doesn't feature a single "loading..." pause and all the cutscenes are in-game. The very first scene in a diner allows you to walk around and read the text off newspapers or stare closely into someone's face if you want. That's the level of detail throughout the game. The poly count is higher, the textures are higher, every cutscene is in-game and when you're out in the city standing on a rooftop you can see all the way to the other side. This is in stark contrast to earlier AK games where loading was a frequent occurrence, cutscenes were movies and every zone was conspicuously distinct.

Re:12G - that's all?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're in the PC gaming crowd you generally know you're in for the regular upgrade cycle.

Only if you are trying to impress people with numbers instead of just enjoying games, or if you insist on turning every setting to max even if it takes several times as much computing power for minimal actual graphics quality change. You can get by with PC gaming with several year old computers just fine, and update now on a cycle comparable to the timescale of consoles and no longer need to spend four digits and a lot of time to do it.

Just another example...

[dristoph]

...of how out of touch the elite billionaire class is with the average American. Batman ought to be ashamed.

Re:The PC version should be the best

[mcl630]

It has 2 supporters, one of which commented "I signing this because I'm stupid."

Re:Allow memory allocation

[trabby]

Java is a bad example of allocating ram.

It performs best when you allocate closer to its actual needs.

Re:Firefox

[mcl630]

That's true, but it is possible for 32-bit applications to use up to 4GB when run on 64-bit Windows if the application is compiled with the right options.

Smaller side-kick

[Tablizer]

That's too much; I'm buying Robin instead

oh good

[slashmydots]

"Warner Bros claims that it's still working closely with its GPU partners in order to enable SLI/Crossfire for the game."
Glad to hear they're working hard on making the game not run unless you buy more hardware. Good job, guys.

Weird definition of game

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

"Games should push the limits."

Weird definition of game you have there. I don't care if it pushes the limit or just lies on the sofa, bottom line for me is a game should be enjoyable, e.g. fun.

Re:Weird definition of game

[KGIII]

You're on Slashdot. A good number of us, I don't know how many, enjoy tweaking, poking, and even breaking stuff just for fun. For us, that is enjoyable. No, I am not a gamer. However, if I'm not pushing my hardware to the limits and breaking something then I'm not learning and I like learning new things. Breaking stuff in new and interesting ways is a way of life for some of us.

Re:Weird definition of game

[KGIII]

I am quite willing to bet that I'm older than you. Probably by a significant margin. I'm retired, so I have lots of free time. However, it has never lost its appeal.

Re:Weird definition of game

[Harlequin80]

You are right that games should be enjoyable first and foremost. However games can become more enjoyable if they push the limits of the systems that exist. Using multiple threads for better AI is an obvious example. However very few games do this.

Obligatory Alfred quote

[antifoidulus]

"Some games just want to watch your CPU burn"

Business decision

[Etherwalk]

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.

Yeah, but the guys who risked their money and years of their life to develop your game might.

Re:Business decision

[Harlequin80]

Maybe. But Origin did very well for itself and every time a crysis game came out it got loads and loads of free marketting. I think that some lost sales are probably made up by other sales won.

Windows 10

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Fucking 10 drives the need to purchase and upgrade PC hardware. Desktop PCs revenue skyrockets.

12GB RAM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember when Bill Gates said everyone only needs 640K (that K as in Kilobyte).

Really Strange

[willworkforbeer]

Batman requires so much memory.. I mean, none of my Wonder Woman jpegs needs more that a couple mega...waitaminute...

Re:Really Strange

[dbIII]

Batman requires so much memory

That's what he needs for contingency plans and backup plans. Batman never ponders where he left the Bat Shark Repellent - he just knows :)

Re:Really Strange

[__aaclcg7560]

You would think that black and so many shades of very, very dark grey would compress easily in the jpeg format.

Re:Really Strange

[KingMotley]

It compresses really well if you downsample to a 2-color palette.

Re:Allow memory allocation

[cfalcon]

You can set up a RAM disk. What you are asking for is the OS to cache things smarter (and with some user hints), and frankly, this could be done.

But Java definitely isn't doing it.

So what?

[OrangeTide]

Even my server from from 2009 has 32GB ram. I've installed 24GB and 16GB in my wife's desktop and my own years ago.
You almost can't have too much RAM installed. Makes great cache when you're not running a big pig of a game.

Re:12GB?

[Blaskowicz]

What's comfortable is going back to the desktop and the browser's memory has (mostly) not been paged out to disk and there's still gigabytes of disk cache. Although 8GB should usually be enough for this.

Re:12G - that's all?

[Blaskowicz]

In the recent months RAM has gone down in price enough. PC manufacturers won't spend an extra $20 to $40 for RAM and/or a few extra $ for a motherboard to have four slots instead of two.

Re:12G - that's all?

[Blaskowicz]

But if your several years old PC happens to not be great enough then you're fucked. It's a chore to upgrade a perfectly working motherboard (and most of what goes on it) to get more CPU and RAM when it's still very good for anything non-gaming (like a ton faster than a $800 smartphone, with 10x-20x the storage). And it has little or no resale value.

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.

Re:Windows 10 Demands 12GB RAM For Batman

[majid_aldo]

WRONG. win 10 is pretty lean and wil run on 2gb of ram.

Not alone

[nospam007]

"Batman Demands 12GB RAM For Windows 10 "

Not only him, I demanded 12 GB or RAM for my Windows 10 too.

Well give it to him...

[rnmartinez]

...After all, he's the goddamned Batman.

Start building that gaming PC

[tekrat]

for the next release.
It will need :
256GB RAM
12 Petabyte hard drive
64 Core CPU running at 32Ghz
128 Core GPU with 64GB dedicated RAM
Liquid Nitrogen cooling

Immersive experience

[keysdisease]

I used to run lunar lander on a pdp8 with 4K and a decwriter. It kept me amused pulling the graveyard shift.

Paging Dr. Batman!

[DarthVain]

One word: Bloat.

Sounds like some really really lazying coding. Considering that the primary audience for this drek are consoles, and it was most certainly designed primarily with that in mind, it is really absurd to think that to "avoid paging" it will require 12GB of RAM which is way more than any console would ever have. Sounds to me that it was designed perhaps narrowly in mind for a console architecture, however when you "turn up the volume" so to speak for an enhanced PC version (i.e. resolutions over 1080p, with fancy graphic bits turned on) it doesn't scale very well, or the method that they use is so brute force and lacking in subtlety that it has the same effect. They are also pretty much saying, "we don't give a damn about the PC market, if you don't like it you have the option of buying more RAM".

That said, any modern PC that is built for gaming is going to be using an SSD anyway, which means even if their is some paging going on, it likely isn't going to be the bottleneck that it used to be.

Steam List Handling

[PincushionMan]

That's easy enough to handle. Make a category, "Finished", and stick your favorite game(s) there that you aren't currently playing. Make another category, "Crap", and stick that kind of stuff in there. When steam opens, categories can be collapsed by default. Et voila! No more games gumming up your screen.

Just like with Windows, there's multiple ways to skin that cat. For instance, you can, change your steam list to just INSTALLED. It is the menu marked GAMES immediately to the right of the Search box. FWIW, that's also how you transition from GAMES to SOFTWARE, in case you've bought any software from Steam. Anyway, changing that to INSTALLED should give you instant gratification. Err, unless you just install everything and leave it... In that case RECENT should do it for you. Hopefully.

Re:Steam List Handling

[Blaskowicz]

Thanks for the tip. I shall make categories for CRAP, but also UNFINISHED - meaning games that aren't really in a finished state, not that I didn't play through - and INCOMPATIBLE because I can't be assed to buy a new graphics card to play a handful games (yay linux)