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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.

20 of 309 comments (clear)

  1. [Technology Reqest #37,395] Need 12GB RAM by Culture20 · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    -Batman

    1. Re:[Technology Reqest #37,395] Need 12GB RAM by cfalcon · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Another example of bloat by techno-vampire · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Another example of bloat by 0123456 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Another example of bloat by tompaulco · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
    3. Re:Another example of bloat by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

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    4. Re:Another example of bloat by Harlequin80 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Another example of bloat by bloodhawk · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:Another example of bloat by gbjbaanb · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  3. Chuckle by nehumanuscrede · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re: Chuckle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

  4. Re:For what? by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  5. Memory? by msauve · · Score: 4, Funny

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

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  6. Wolf3D, Doom, Quake... by Dan+East · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  7. Re: Oh, fine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

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

  8. 8K of Bat-RAM by tepples · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  9. sod the bloody Bat-Man by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

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  10. Re:For what? by tnk1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  11. Re:Really Strange by dbIII · · Score: 4, Funny

    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 :)

  12. Re:For what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You should try freeciv. It kicks ass.