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?

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A AAA game will never be in a humble bundle, and any reasonable sale price will take place after the game has been superseded long ago by something else as the new hotness.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

[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?

[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?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should try freeciv. It kicks ass.

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.

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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.

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

Memory?

[msauve]

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

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...

[Snotnose]

Optimizations, both memory and performance, are difficult.

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

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.

Wait a minute

[Cro Magnon]

Is this Batman? Or Fatman?

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

a Jesus-built hotrod

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

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.

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: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 :)

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:Really Strange

[__aaclcg7560]

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