Gotham Knights PC: Can Its Severe Problems Explain Poor Console Performance?
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- Опубліковано 26 жов 2022
- It's no secret that Gotham Knights on consoles has some profound issues - and in looking at the PC version we get some perspective on the challenges facing the game on console hardware. On top of that, the PC port has its own set of problems on top of that... Alex Battaglia reports.
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Man, Alex's suppressed rage leaking out of his voice as he talks about the stutters is scary lol devs really botched this game. What a bummer all around
6:00
Well he, like every Customer, should be 'enraged' by the state of the game at launch - and at least Digital Foundry have the tools, dedication, experience and RESPECT in the industry, that they are able to get many devs to 'fix' their games. He is right that its totally unacceptable to put out games to 'cash-in' instead of polishing the game to an acceptable level for ALL platforms....
@@BAMozzy69 simple don't pre-order games poor studios
The only saving grace here are the gratuitous nightwing-buns shots.
We're about to move into dual renders of 120fps+ for VR. Devs need to respect 60fps from the beginning, like Nintendo does, or they won't have learned the fundamentals needed to make quality next gen VR content.
What’s funny to me is that they could have made their recommended specs way lower. No need to keep them high when no matter your PC it’ll run terribly
They clearly didn't know how to get the most out of UE4, I don't know why they didn't just reuse UE3 since that's what Arkham Knight used, it looks great, and everyone knows it in the game dev industry. Harder specs for worse graphics, embarrassing.
@@bearshark5941 because UE3 licensing would have put them 500k out of pocket, further development of the engine for specific use would be extra cost, not to mention the advantages of UE4's out of the box stuff over UE3. They did amazing things with UE3 but it's truly out of it's time now.
@@bearshark5941 fair point, however I don‘t think that would have been a solution either. First of all, as far as I‘m aware there is no support or easy way to export ue3 games to Current Gen Consoles, unless they specifically targeted the last gen consoles without a dedicated current gen version and only backwards compatibility as a way to play. Also, the ue3 engine used in Arkham Knight was heavily modified by Rocksteady Studios, if I remember correctly they modified and replaced over 60% of the ue3 engine’s rendering code for Arkham Knight. And I doubt anyone but Rocksteady could easily use that modified engine to build a game (We just have to remember the disastrous pc port of Arkham Knight)
Exactly what I was saying if they can't even develop a game at low specs what makes you think it'll run better on higher specs a janky game is janky
HAha true, very true, what difference does it make
Man us gamers are so lucky to have Digital Foundry on our side.
Totalbiscuit would be proud. But i'm also glad for him that he doesn't have to witness todays gaming industry.
@@ChristophAdler89 Not sure I'd say I'm glad he doesn't have to witness today's gaming industry. I'd prefer he was alive and could make the choice to just stop following the game industry if he got that sick of it.
Their work literally improve our games. Devs definitely watch their videos and there's been instances that games were improved directly based on their feedback.
@@LucDutra92 Japanese devs don’t.
Yes Digital Foundry is the best
Something that comes to mind about hitching whilst riding around is World Composition. In Unreal 4 we create large worlds with WComp and each sub-level can be loaded in when needed. However it's not great out of the box. There is heavy hitching when loading sub-levels so a lot of them are pre-loaded and just have their visibility set. However some sub-levels are used as layers of levels. So you could have an outer level with distance geometry in it, and when you get closer it switches out detail levels. There is no async level loading by default with this system and you have to either pre-load all levels, or manually create an async function that uses the level handles to load and unload the sub-levels and set visibility. I have never found the out of the box WComp to work properly without some hitching due to assets in the loaded level. But when I wrote a custom plugin to manage async sub level loading I found I could manage it at a time I preferred. Just to note, this isn't an issue in Unreal Engine 5 with the newer World Partition.
Yeah, the timing is a shame. At least some of these issues probably never would have happened if Gotham Knights had started development a little later after Unreal 5 was available.
@@deschain1910 I don't know about that. It seems like all the issues with the game are design related not necessarily tech related. Some of the issues they ran into here have been mitigated or fixed by other developers out there using UE4. But either the team didn't have the experience, technical knowledge, time or a combination of all of that to pull it off. The game was originally a cross-gen game so I doubt UE5 was ever a factor and personally UE5 isn't some kind of magic bullet if the design is at fault. They would still have tech hurdles they would run into. Compare to Rocksteady who was using a customized UE3 and did wonders with that engine.
@@apoclypse
I don't know if you noticed that I said at least SOME of these issues probably never would have happened, which I think is realistic and not implying that UE5 is a magic bullet. Also, if it had started development later, it probably wouldn't have been intended as a cross-gen game either.
I think it's unrealistic to act like UE5 is exactly the same as UE4 in all of these aspects. It seems highly unlikely to me that it would have made no difference whatsoever. The game itself is plenty enjoyable in its current state, especially playing with a co-op partner. The gear doesn't really get in the way. The biggest issues are in the open world implementation and the stuttering, which would have been greatly improved or not present at all in UE5.
All of the hurdles that are present in UE4 but are not in UE5 would have simply been non-issues at that point, regardless of the team's resources or experience because the issues simply wouldn't have been there. There may have been other issues instead, but that's outside of the scope of what I was talking about and is straying further into speculative territory. If we're speculating, maybe the team would have had more experience relevant to those issues than with the issues they encountered with UE4. Who knows?
i dont know but it seems to me that with each new unreal release the games are getting dumbed down further and further. The issues become more frequent. Funny in comparison to how fenomenal Arkham Knight looks on a modified Unreal 3. Zero issues, no hitching. I don't think i've ever played a single Unreal 3 game where there was hitching.
@@deschain1910 I would say that it's highly unlikely that the issues would be resolved if they originally used UE5. A lot of the performance issues as mentioned in the video seems to hint at a lack of customized features, UE5 have a steeper learning curve if we put optimization into the picture and it's highly unlikely that a team that is inexperience with UE4 would give us a more polished product with UE5. Surely some engine-default features would be implemented better in UE5, but the additional development time wasted on learning and testing would easily out-weight those potential improvements. Given that the project's original vision with UE4 is already proven to be too ambitious for the team, having UE5 in mind would make the planning stage even more disastrous...
5:40: "Based upon the intro to this game on PC, I can safely say that the publisher put out this game on launch day without a high priority that the player's first gameplay experience would be good." WOW. That might be the most savage thing I've heard in a DF review in a while.
I laughed out loud at that part. Savage, but true.
I was thinking the same thing. It's very "got 'em!".
That's why i'am subscibed at DF...they know their stuff and are honest👍
@@Saturn2888 it’s really not their style either but if they say something like that, it must be bad lol
I really think they just need to release this to meet management deadline and satisfy investors...
The opening shots that show off the team are brutal. C'mon now there is NO EXCUSE for that !
There is an excuse, but it's a very bad one. It goes as follow :
"We don't fekking care, you'll buy it anyway, you damn sheep."
Honestly, this should be enforced at API level by now. Want to use DirectX or Vulkan? Pre-compile or go home 😂
@@lamikal2515 I don’t think this game is going to have sold well.
@@QellOmnyhydrax Well, nowadays most of the AAA sells are pre-orders. Combine that to the ambiant turd-smeared toilets smell acceptance that stinges AAA gaming right now, and bam. Even if you pre-ordered a game that happens to be just a bit better than the mass, and you'l most likely not even bother to ask for a refund, even if the game is objectively horrendous, because when you're surronded by shit, at some point, even piss become "acceptable".
@@QellOmnyhydrax It's Batman. It'll sell plenty
As an UE dev, I suspect most of the issues everyone is witnessing has to do with the always active UI, not so much the streaming. The game is very UI intensive and all of the computation needed to make it work (translating 3D space objects to 2D, even when they are off screen) is super CPU intensive as it HAS to calculate this every tick. UI in unreal, when done exclusively in blueprints, is wasteful and inefficient and the most dips I've noticed has happened when more than 2 characters with UI over their heads appears. Add to this the fact that they have health bars, level indicators, compass, and even in level navigation means that the CPU is being hammered even when nothing graphically is going on. It gets worse when other elements of the game have been made exclusively in blueprints rather than native code, producing a performance hit that no GPU can overcome.
Yeah ticking in Blueprints is an absolute killer - for those unfamiliar, a blueprint tick is basically is sequence of visual script logic that runs at a fixed interval (usually every 0.016 seconds). That logic is comprised of nodes, which essentially house bits of C++ code. The trouble is that the same thing implemented in *just* C++ will always be faster because even though the nodes are C++ inside, the blueprint script itself is executed by a virtual machine. While inside the node performance is equal, the VM bytecode traversing the script adds a fixed performance loss per node. I can't recall the exact numbers involved, but if you imagine some C++ code that takes 0.1 ms to run that is broken into 4 blueprint nodes that take 0.025ms to run, the blueprint won't take 0.1ms to execute, it'll take 0.1ms *plus* 4 times however long it takes the VM to traverse the bytecode representing node connections the script.
It's why most places will strictly rule ticking in blueprint scripts is not allowed, because even 5 nodes in a script might not look like many connections, but it is when you're doing it 60 times a second, even more so when it's across a very large number of blueprints.
Also as far as I know the blueprint VM is strictly single threaded, which aligns with the performance we're seeing here.
The CPU utilisation on those RiverTuner stats are averaging about 30%, so how can this crappy performance be the CPU's doing here? If they were chugging at 80-100% utilisation, I would concede that the Ryzen met its match, but both CPU AND GPU are underutilised, which is telling me it's a coding issue.
The game has just been poorly optimised and released in a state, the same issues occured with Arkham Knight at first, except it was worse, because it was accompanied by a load of spontaneous crashes at various points in the game. But it was the same thing in terms of underutilised GPU and CPU on release, which later smoothed out with each patch.
Much different game now to what it was, but it took a LONG time to get there.
@@Longlostpuss if you watched the video they explained all of it, it's cpu limited because of it's single core limit. So it won't utilize all cores or threads so the cpu as a whole isn't being bottlnecked but only using 1 core 1 thread limits overall performance they even showed 3 games with full cpu core and thread utilization and you see the difference in fps
@@audiokrak9598 It is using more than one core--it's not literally single-threaded, no AAA game like this could be--but it's not saturating really any of them, which only confirms it's a coding issue. If it were actually single-threaded and then truly limited by CPU hardware, one core should at least be in the upper-90%'s. If you want to look back, there were a couple cores 50-60%+.
"CPU limited" is honestly just a terrible term to use in these contexts, and I think DF should think about changing how they present issues like these. "CPU limited" to me sounds like the CPU isn't powerful enough, which is definitely not the case here based on the low utilization.
"Developer limited" or "dev limited" is probably more accurate in this case. The performance of the product is being limited by the product itself, or really, how it was developed.
@@phoenixfieryn1257 I totally get what you're saying, but if that's the case, why did Arkham Origins and Arkham Knight start out on release with low CPU utilisation and extremely poor performance and then reversed course as soon as they started receiving patches? Both CPU and GPU utilisation increased and performance increased with it as a result. Coincidence much?
I see absolutely nothing different going on here, it's like deja vu.
They announced yesterday I believe, that they’re working on a “large patch” to address these issues but I’m not too confident that they will. They were very insistent that there was nothing wrong with the game and the performance was due to the nature of the multiplayer before it launched.
Hah yeah, corporations never lie. Ever
Looks like most of the issues are cross-platform from PC and consoles apart from the shader compilation that's just on the PC.
I don't think one patch is going to fix this mess and it's likely going to take many, probably over the next 6 months.
So tired of waiting for patches after the game.
They never fixed Batman Arkham Knight for PC, I don't have much faith that they'll fix this either. I'll believe it when I see it, basically.
@@mjc0961 Arkham Knight has been 100% fixed on PC for 7 years now.
The fact that the auto detect settings default to low/medium for certain CPU intensive settings, even on a literal top of the line 12th Gen Intel CPU with a 4090, means the devs totally knew this game wasn't optimized, and they shipped it anyway. Any claims or justifications they make about the 30FPS cap that don't include this optimization information are outright misleading.
And it still looks worse than arkham knight. Devs these days are like " well screw the paying customers, let's increase system requirements instead of working on optimisation , put in drm, the idiots would still pay for the brand name."
How abysmal
I dont think the devs are to blame for either, this is probably management saying "Lets go ahead" without taking the devs advice that the game needed more time in the oven.
It's always due to that. Most of the time the devs don't have that much control over deadlines as you may believe (dev for other stuff here).
@@Elratauru this project itself had to be scrapped. Living up to the arkham legacy is a very lofty goal. Even arkham origins which was done by the same devs isn't considered great by many players. And that game had the same great arkham formula with an awesome story. The only downside is , it didn't introduce more new gameplay. Introducing useless RPG elements , unnecessary crafting items , enemy scaling on top of a Gotham that is in every way lacklustre to the one in arkham knight makes Gotham knights mediocre in every way. There is no excuse that they couldn't have predicted the outcome. Even if the performance somehow was patched this is an inferior game , probably the worst game in the batman universe.
@@dr.sivavignesh664 Arkham Origins was actually developed by WB Games Montreal, the same people who developed Gotham Knights.
Rocksteady, the developer of the core Arkham trilogy had little to do with either of those games, and it shows.
When it was announced that the consoles would have 8-core CPUs (with some cores reserved for the OS), I was so hopeful that it would encourage developers to actually take multithreading seriously. Well, here we are two years into the generation, and "next-gen-exclusive" games are still primarily single-thread limited. I know optimization is no easy task, but this is just sad to see. It could've performed so much better if the devs had managed to actually utilize the CPU more.
8 cores and hyperthreading too so 16.
@@HugoStiglitz88 6 cores, 12 threads and a lower frecuency when SMT is enabled, massive difference in L2 and L3 cache. Not the same scenario
Bruh they have 8 cores in the last generation, and back then AMD's architecture aint good so those got poor single thread performance, that should have forced developers to go multi-threaded, in the end they didnt and with the new gen CPU having good single thread performance definitely nothing is going to change
@@funbrute31 Xbox reserves only one core for OS, also this was a cross gen game initially that's the reason for no SMT usage here, this is not laziness in my mind but devs having no choice in putting out the game for the sake of the company even at their behest. They should've delayed it and at minium made a performance mode without RT and worked better at it so the 40fps mode would be better then what it is as locked 40fps is better then nothing. It's sad how a seven year old Batman game looks much better then this fake next gen game.
One game doesn't matter and doesn't make a trend
Thanks for this Alex! Two takeaways:
1. Would have still liked a console performance mode for folks with VRR TVs.
2. Being so CPU limited means that blaming the Series S is preposterous as its CPU is a bit faster than the PS5's.
Lol, well there are no developers that have blamed ps5 for anything, your speed comparisons must be full of shit
This. I'd take 40 fps cap or uncapped frame rate, if at all possible.
“Its” cpu.
The irony of devs bashing the Series S is that it actually has more games running at 120 fps than the PS5.
Ugh, Alex, your last couple productions (while of stellar quality, as per usual) seem to have been exercises in frustration, but so glad you powered through to give us the insights only you can provide. Thank you for hanging in there on even the most frustrating of projects, the community would be at a loss without your work!
So whts the PS5 equivalent graphics settings?
@@prezidenttrump5171, thank you for your insightful, considerate, and deeply reflective response. I had wondered where all of the intellect and empathy on UA-cam had gone, but we can all relax as clearly you’ve been harboring it. I look forward to further discourse with you, especially since I assume your rhetorical tools will only continue to blossom with those middle school vocabulary classes. While your employment of last week’s “queer” certainly isn’t optimal, keep trying!
@@BrianJones-wk8cx w comeback
@@prezidenttrump5171 LMFAO
@@prezidenttrump5171 After getting rekt like this I would delete my youtube account and social life if I was you. Hope you are able to recover from whatever pain or period cramps you are going through.
@Brian Jones w comeback
I remember when Arkham Knight came out with numerous issues like this on PC and that was right when Valve implemented refunds.
At very least, Arkham Knight was fun and well thought out, if too technically demanding at the time. Since then, it's aged like a fine wine.
@@thez28camaroman The thing is even at the time it wasn't too technically demanding because the PC version performed like hot garbage next to even the base ps4 and xbox one. So much so they pulled it from the store front.
Hahahaha yeah, Warner Bros was getting so many refunds that they pulled the game to make it stop.
at the end they fixed it? i noticed 2 weeks ago that i have it on epic, downloaded it and played it and is smooth even with capped fps (30, 60 and 90 fps), or is it only a epic store thing?
@@lm_dccxl4078 I think that's because today's PCs are 10 years faster than the PCs of back then.
Those stutters are crazy. I hope it becomes the norm soon to follow the Uncharted port approach (of allowing you to compile shaders on the main menu before starting gameplay)
Actually a lot of games does that, those game where they have an additional "setup" step during their first launch on a system are compiling the shaders. Uncharted's decision to compile it on the main menu is a bit unorthodox, maybe something they have to do due to porting from console.
The best games just intelligently do it while you play. It's seamless. Compiling in the menu is still a welcomed addition to the games that just expect us to suffer a stutter fest. (looking at you, Elden Ring).
What boggles my mind is they REMOVED shader pre-compilation on Horizon Zero Dawn because people were whining it took too long.
Uncharted port performance is fantastic. After shader compiling it almost never has any stuttering. I’m running it maxed out 1440p ultra wide on a rtx 3080 with dlss set to quality and getting 120-130fps. Dlss turned off around 90fps. Although it has its issues regarding raw input but that is quickly fixed but disabling pointer precision in windows settings.
@@alexatkin Nah they just optimized it to do it in the background. Check their latest patch notes. That is thanks to the good work by Nixxes.
I feel like this was planned as a live service, Warner realized the winds were changing so they cut their losses and had the team switch directions and rush it out.
The way the game showers you with different currencies and crafting materials reeks of a planned and cut microtransaction economy. Also, can we just talk about how absurd it is that Bruce Wayne's proteges have to loot random crap off of street thugs to craft their gadgets and gear?
summary : the devs fuc*ed up
Its crazy that publishers allow this sort of thing to be released. If I remember correctly, this game was actually supposed to come a few weeks later and was pushed up... how could they have looked at this and said "yeah it's ready, lets release it early"
I mean it's probably not the developers deciding when it's released.
@@Batman-bh6vw facts, I overgeneralized. Development/publishing people.
Multi-core optimization may simply have been outside their capability
I know one of the lead artist on it, as well as a good bunch of other game devs (not at WB), I can assure you they don’t like their work being seen in that state :/
The most likely scenario is that Warner knew the game was a complete stinker, so just shoved it out on a date where they felt it'd have the least competition. If it came out a few weeks later it'd be competing with stuff like Call of Duty. At least this way they can trick some unsuspecting suckers into buying it and get some of their money back before abandoning it. The fact that they removed Denuvo five days after launch also suggests this, since they wouldn't want to pay the ongoing licensing fee for that for a game which they know is a flop. No doubt we'll see it on Humble Choice or somewhere in the next 12 months too.
A superbly thorough look at the situation - great work as always, DF.
I LOVE that callback to Spencer Nielsen’s soundtrack to Batman Returns on Sega CD. It’s been one of my favorite videogame soundtracks for decades. A really great little detail to an otherwise interesting and informative video! Nice job, Alex!
They need a patch that pre loads the shader compilation process BEFORE you start the game (waiting 5~10m, doesn't matter), the compilation can continue in real time, pre loading things you'll see later while you play.
WB needs to refund anyone who bought the game, pay pending salary and labor liquidation to WB Montreal employees then close the studio.
As a series X and PS5 owner I am not worried this will be the norm. I also will skip any games that are 30fps only.
And at $70 to boot! Should have launched at $29.99
for the price of an Xbox Series X and a PS5 with the games and the subscriptions to gamepass and PSN , you could have a high end PC and never worrying again about a 30 FPS cap ever !
I'm a 60fps elitist myself, but if the game looks similar to The Matrix Demo and have a solid 30 (or maybe even 40), I can make an exception. But I'm with you, 60fps games will def be my priority.
if you are on Xbox don't skip plague tale
its a masterpiece and also available on gamepass!
Then in a few years you won't be buying any games lol
So you spend $1500 on a GPU and AAA games/Devs don't even utilise it. 50-60% utilisation? 😂
Should've spent more on a cpu as well
Thats not how that works. The game would be using it if the CPU could keep up. This game was just very poorly built and is way, way CPU bottlenecked. Either this game gets fixed a lot in the future or we need to wait for some obscene CPUs in the future to unlock the rest of the GPU performance. But, in theory, if you had an insane CPU like that the GPU would get closer to 100% utilization.
Even a $200 CPU could run this game like it's nothing if developers put some effort.
A 12th gen i5 is $150 and it's extremely powerful
Wow, this has to be one of the best videos I've seen from Digital Foundry. Thorough and professionally done, you've shed light on pressing issues of 30fps, current-gen console performance and pre-launch game optimization. This analysis provides a tremendous service to consumers and gaming as a whole. Well done!
Man I nerd out so much when you guys get down and technical with these kind of videos, Keep em coming!
Hard pass. No reason to support these developers with the current state of the game. If they can fix it and prove themselves then I would support them.
For me it isn’t even about them-I want other dev teams (and their masters) to be afraid to release a game in this condition
Don't worry, after 2 years worth of 'updates', I'm sure the game will finally be in exactly the state it SHOULD have been in on the ACTUAL release date!
Trouble is gaming is such a HUGE business that these devs are FORCED to release a game on a certain date so it lines up with all the associated promotional billboards, online ads, magazine stuff, commercials, etc...
So the question is, do they MISS the official ship date and lose money on ALL the promotion that's already taking place? Or do they just dump a turd and hope it's not TOO much of a mess to eventually clean up before people completely ignore it?
@@StreetPreacherr Wasn't this a case with both Batman Arkham Origins, and Arkham Knight (specifically on PC). Those games PC versions were never properly patched, and any improvements in performance over time have just simply come from newer hardware being able to run them better. Not gonna hold my breath that Gotham Knights will ever see a proper patch to improve it even on PC.
I'm not even going to PIRATE this game. I have a Ryzen 3100 (OC to 4.1GHz, 1.11V) that does well enough in *a lot* of other games
Yeah. Lazy dev. Vote with your wallet.
Great Video! This was a super interesting case. Pretty crazy that the dips were occurring in the same places.
I appreciate the hardwork and explaining what the true issues are with the framerates.
I've been following DF for many many years. You're doing god's work with these videos guys
Another issue is the in game max render resolution setting that by default is 87% while the screen resolution is 1440p. So the game looks blurry by default unless you move the slider for max render resolution to 100% of your current resolution.
Also if you turn on FSR or DLSS then turn it off the max rendered resolution slider becomes locked and the slider is at like 70% or less making the game look worse than default settings.
Only way you can get access to that slider again is to reset in game graphic settings to default.
So the game stutters and looks blurry. I really hope they fix these issues among other things.
If you just set the quality of the upscale type to off it will set the resolution back to 100% without resetting anything. So you have to turn both dlss and the upscale quality to off
@@brandenc3860 Fascinating. I’ll have to check that out then.
@@brandenc3860 You were right about the upscale quality settings having to be change after disabling FSR/DLSS to get the render resolution back at native (100%).
This is the first game that I’ve owned where simply disabling FSR/DLSS didn’t take care of all that to the point I didn’t even notice it.
Loved seeing this as I jumped back into the game earlier this morning to try to figure these things out and work on a 60fps base. This game has been especially challenging in that area as plenty have experienced.
Alex, excellent video. This was probably one of my favorites in a long time. Not because you were probably quite frustrated with the content you were creating, but I enjoyed it because it gave great insight on the real reason why this game had to run at 30fps on consoles. I don't like putting blame on devs because I'm sure many of them worked very hard to produce this game, but it does seem like they did a very poor job of optimizing for CPU's. I really hope this doesn't become a trend.
This was my guess. The moment I heard all 3 9th gen consoles were stuck at 30 fps with no low res 60 fps mode, but the Series was getting 1440p instead of 1080p, that screamed inefficient CPU bottleneck. For all the flack Series S gets for being the weaker console, its cpu at least is on par with the other two systems.
I hope this technical catastrophe of a game at least serves as an example of what never to do in open world game development.
RT doesn't even seem to improve the image enough to endure such performance
Why this idiotic console makers don't have systemwide option to turn off ray tracing is beyond baffling to me.
@@lordspalse0062 i believe they put so much hype and brain washing into RT and how much we need it that they must use it at this point , i promise in 2 years nobody will care about RT itll be something else
@@DonaldHendleyBklynvexRecords very true. I hate all this industry generated resource hogging features these companies release to give gamers an excuse to keep wasting their hard earned resources on newer hardware. Imagine these idiots releasing a 90 tflop gpu and still advertising upscaling technologies like dlss 3.0. Who on earth cares about upscaling on a 70 tflop gpu?
@@lordspalse0062 yea you are totally rite! its like when Phys X came out with cards to help GPUs a long time ago , it was a cash grab ,they swore it was the next biggest thing , also hairworks , otherwise our 5+ year old cards would still be pusging out decent framerates , same with framerates in fact , they sold us the idead these systems will do 4k 120 fps with Rt and they cant , false advertising if a few older games didnt fill the boxs , now with talk of pro systems its all cash grabs ,turn RT off and enjot these games at reasonable prices is whay smart adult will do unless rich or a youtuber
I hate all this industry generated resource hogging features these companies release to give gamers an excuse to keep wasting their hard earned resources on newer hardware. Imagine these idiots releasing a 90 tflop gpu and still advertising upscaling technologies like dlss 3.0. Who on earth cares about upscaling on a 70 tflop gpu?
Can't wait to see your tech analysis of A Plague Tale: Requiem for PC!
I like how the car bounces into the air at 9:34 when the not-so-distant distant area unloads
This is why I despise the fact that so many upcoming games are going to be based on Unreal. There's so many deep seated issues with that engine, chief being its reliance on single core performance. It doesn't look like they've addressed that on 5 or will address it any time soon. The only studio other than epic who have proven that can handle unreal well is the Coalition that's it.
WB Games Montréal are just nostalgic for the days when software rendering was an option.
ah ! yeah , the good all days of Glide , GNU GPL , Quake Engine , 3DFx Voodoo, Matrox , .......
I really appreciate the time and effort Digital Foundry puts into these videos. Always my “go to” when I want to decide what console to purchase a 3rd party game on.
PC is always better 😜
@@xfreejack001x
Not always. FFVII remake is far better on PS5 than PC unless you download mods to fix it.
The game’s visuals don’t scale up very much. So the normal huge performance out of a good GPU versus the console version doesn’t really enter the fray. It’s just a bad port job.
@@xfreejack001x i know youre trying to be a troll here but that kind of emoji just makes you look like an unself-aware asshat
@@OrtadragoonX true but overall pc is the best platform, beside devs tweak or performance for console.
@@OrtadragoonX Okay, so I grab it cheap on PC, download mods to fix it, and it's better than PS5.
7:35 He doesn't mention that when you do a clean install update on your card, all the shaders will need to compile again, giving you the same studders in game.
He has mentioned that this is the case with many other titles that have shader compilation stutter. With how often he has complained about this issue I don't think it really needs saying since pretty much everyone already knows.
Hey DF, Resident Evil Village just came out for Apple Silicon machines and looks to be running great through the whole lineup. Any chance of a Digital Foundry deep dive on the performance?
Warner Montreal is just a shit developer. If CDPR can get Cyberpunk running at 60 on Series S, then there's no excuse.
Great video. So is there a behind the scenes reason for this? Was this CPU limitation intentional? Does it make development easier? Doesn't seem like a big AAA publisher would make this kind of mistake by accident.
The reality is it's just a troubled development cycle for the dev and the publisher probably pushed the game out despite the issues to top it off.
CPU optimization in utilizing all the cores is something that had to be done on PS4 and Xbox one to get any kind of decent performance out of games. But it seems like the higher overall CPU performance of next gen has made some devs stop prioritizing fully utilizing all cores and focus on using only a few cores
Unreal engine is very heavy on single thread unless you code very carefully,and game devs in general know way less about cpu code than gpu ones.
Great analysis. As for anyone worried about this game being a precursor to a sudden increase of 30fps console games going forward; I think it was a silly notion to begin with, as there are so many console games that both look AND perform better... and some of them were with developers barely tapping into the myriad of new hardware features available. In fact, it seems to me that most games are still scratching the surface of what modern console hardware can do.
Thank you for this Alex! I really would like to play this game but guess it's better to wait to see if these issues will get fixed :)
Even on high end pcs not optimized
Very interesting video! Definitely hope more developers will use multithreading on the cpus. Also interesting note, we found out that Spider-Man on the ps5 had huge cpu offload because streaming was handled by the hardware decompression. Which is why you need a much stronger cpu on pc. I guess multiplatform games won’t use that as much but first party should have no problem. CPU utilization may be the same issue on plagues tale. Interested to see the video on that too.
Plague's Tale is more justified,there are scenes with hundreds of thousands of rats,this is extremely heavy on the CPU.
Plague tale? lmao how about you blame the shit console? the bottleneck is because the cpu is too slow very little to do with the devs, plague tale runs fine on old hardware on pc as low as a 1060 can play at 30fps the fact its 30fps on console just shows how crap they are. Most games already use 8 threads for games but if a single thread gets fully utilized you have a bottleneck as it slows down the next frames being shown.CPUS cannot share a calculations between threads so as soon as one is full you will need to wait for that calculation to finish.This has already been explained by daniel owen look him up
@@hfjtrytry9216 it was pretty clear here that the cpu was being utilized incorrectly. And this is usually the case in many games and then fixed. The consoles are not going to be powerhouses but utilized properly they can provide a very enjoyable experience. Take Spider-Man for example as insomniac has done wonders to make it run with 60fps and RT on the ps5, which is typically kills even some of the latest CPU’s on PC
great job as always...could you guys take another look at The Medium on PC to see if things have improved
This is a top-tier video! Amazing, as always Alex! Love the CPU analysis, especially comparing other games with a similar bottleneck.
The Console CPU’s aren’t a bottleneck this Generation as instead it’s the developers lack of performance optimizations which are responsible for poor performance as the New Consoles are far more than capable of delivering a rock solid 60fps !
@@technologylord4017 They're not a bottleneck running cross-gen games. They will ultimately become the bottleneck, especially if people are expecting 60FPS minimum, and even 120fps games.
@@danwarb1 they’re not a bottleneck even in Gotham Knights and or Plagues Tale Requiem either and they won’t be limited to only 30fps going forward because 95% of Next Gen game’s will still have optional 60fps minimum standard performance modes but with the two specific game’s I’m talking about for example Gotham Knights is 30fps not cause of Cpu bottleneck but rather it’s only because the devs aren’t making use of the 8 core 16 thread CPU’s of The New Consoles as instead it’s basically running single core limited utilization, and so it’s either an engine problem or the devs aren’t optimizing to the full extent but when devs get it fixed both games will have 60fps patches in the future for sure !
The New Consoles have custom Ryzen 3700x based CPUs with 8 cores 16 threads as those are extremely powerful CPU’s, and they’re more than enough for 60fps standard across the board
@@technologylord4017 no it's not the same as 3700x, not even close. The SMT core frequency is laughably slower with a huge drop in L3 cache. What the fuck is with that 8mb L3 cache though? And the L2 cache of 512kb as well. 3700x has 4MB L2 and 32 MB L3 cache and we know how important cache is in gaming. I'm not saying the current gen consoles are incapable of delivering 60fps in the future but it will be difficult to maintain 60fps later on a very demanding games with a lot of stutters as a problem and 120fps is out of the question even now on demanding titles.
@@fugitive6549 obviously you didn’t read when I said custom Ryzen 3700x based CPU as I never said it wasn’t a slightly trimmed down part without boost speed, and smaller cache as that’s true but with Pc that stuff matters significantly more than it does with Consoles because devs can optimize in order to get significantly more performance out of the hardware as opposed to Pc as that’s always been the way it works !
Regardless what I said stands true Man as there’s no Cpu bottleneck in the New System’s, and it’s all up the the devs to utilize the hardware to its full potential, and when they do it’s easily gonna deliver 60fps minimum standard performance modes across the board in 95% of Next Gen Game’s
Thank you for that classic Batman Returns music. Underrated soundtrack.
But remember guys. It's the xbox series s holding back gaming.
I know that was such a stupid claim to make
this is how you know like 95% of gamers pull shit out of their ass just about every time they open their mouth. oh wait I forgot a Dev said this too. looks like some inexperienced indie devs also just making excuses
Lazy and incompetent developers holding back gaming
plague tale 30fps, dying light 2 30fps, elden ring 30-60fps in performance mode says other wise lmao
I mean thats still true
Great content! Makes you question a lot of creators out there that wasn’t telling the truth about this game Smdh
Unless I'm mistaken didn't you have some music from Batman on the Mega CD in the background, nice 👍.
I'm finding that when I remove RT and jam everything up to high i'm getting 55-60fps on my 10700k paired with a 3070, but the second I turn on RT, I'm hitting 20's consistently -- even on ultra performance with DLSS
tbh even 60fps should be unacceptable
@@moniumus6303 It's a shame because I'm enjoying my time with the game, but after 12 hours of slogging through, I'm keen to see if any updates can make it better, but from the sound of it, probably not.
@@leviharris6944 i dont even really understand why the game exists or what the point of it is on top sadly. It doesnt really do anything new and what it does, its predecessor did better 7y ago sadly
Something i also noticed with Gotham knights vs Arkham knight is the max speed of the players vehicle/traversal in the world. Gotham knights is much slower (fancy FOV tricks aside), which is probably also to alleviate CPU costs when moving around the open world streaming data in.
Performance aside, those bike 'physics' look like they're straight out of a '90s arcade machine.
Amazing video. So much good information
DF as always, doing gods work💪
They didn't even try to make the driving looks good holy fuck😭😭
Nice Easter egg with the backround music, Spencer Nilsen Batman returns on Sega CD.😀 great analysis. Is their no Ue4 coding guru who can come and save this game?
Can I borrow compiled shaders from another player? Do you need the same system or just a video card and driver version? The bottleneck is not only the processor but also the memory subsystem, possibly RAM or cache levels
Games are becoming significantly more demanding without looking better.
that what i was thinking WTf that shows devs laziness to optimize their games ... batman arkham looks better with higher framerate
developers are getting lazier
or more accurately the investors are forcing developers to release games way too early because they are greedy
not all games , only those developed by lazy fucks ...look at A Plague Tale Requiem (on PC ) , Cyberpunk 2077 v1.6 , Call Of Duty Modern Warfare II , Uncharted 4 on PC ....
@@Israel.Is.TerroristState Arkham Knight had horrific optimization problems at launch on PC, it was basically impossible to get above 30fps when free roaming in the city regardless of your setup, and it still to this day stutters like shit when you're gliding around. It's obvious that they've had deep issues with coding their open world performance since then considering they included Arkham Knight in the PS+ collection for PS5 and it never got a next gen patch even just unlocking the frame rate. For a game that was already 5 years old when the PS5 came out, it's still 30 fps even though it should be able to hit 60 easily. It's because their open world's are simply coded like shit and designed to target 30fps and that's it.
@@librarygary1618 Nah Arkham Knight is smooth as butter now.
I am holding Developers accountable, and they need to explain this poor performance. It's disheartening to spend your money on a next-generation game only to discover that saving on cost was essential.
True, but couldn’t you _tell_ there was something wrong with this game before launch? From the way the team spoke about it, what they perceived to be its strengths
@@WeeWeeJumbo I did. I'm speaking g for the masses, but they, like any developer, need to answer for this performance
this game was built for ps4/xbox and they cancelled those versions late in development. This is not a next-gen release... it's a ps4/xbox game running on ps5/xsx, and still isn't running well regardless.
@@A.F.1 why does your UA-cam username look like a Fortnite Creative map
I had forgotten that I had subscribed to this channel
I don't get notifications of new videos
Alex's mid spec PC has the exact same specs as my own gaming machine. Very convenient 😁
Sony and MS need to set a standard where performance like this should be unacceptable for them and the game shouldn't be allowed on their stores, only then will these greedy companies stop rushing games and give the devs enough time to optimize them properly.
So Arkham Knight a better buy right now if I am in the market for some dc?
Absolutely
Just actually bought it yesterday. Only issue is frame rate is capped at 90 but it runs super smooth on my 3080.
The PC port is now the best way to play it.
All of the older Arkham games are a better bet. Even WB Montreals Arkham Origins game is a better bet than this.
I got the cracked version(ryzen 5 3600,6600xt) running on an snd and the game didnt have any stutter for me,maybe denuvo has something to do with the bought version?
This channel is doing the Lord's work. Good analysis.
excellent video!
What I don't get is...
how is the game "limited by the CPU" if the CPU is not even fully used at any given time? Wouldn't that mean that the game is "limited by the engine" or "by design" rather than by the CPU? Because even on the Ryzen 3600 there's still plenty of CPU power left, it's just not used by the game?
What engine does the game use?
Unreal. This probably isn't an engine problem, probably just very bad optimization on the CPU part.
The game uses Unreal Engine 4. The Ryzen 3600 does have more headroom if the software was intelligently optimized. However with gaming you are often limited by a single thread since other parts of the game rely on that information. The fact that a GPU is sitting at 50% utilization shows there is plenty of GPU power left but it can't be tapped into until you alleviate the CPU bottleneck.
In general CPU bottlenecks are worse than GPU bottlenecks. Ideally you cap your FPS right before either one bottlenecks so you have headroom and a super smooth experience.
@@Phil_529 yeah that makes a lot of sense...
after watching the video again, I saw the 1st core usually hovering around 75-85+ so that might explain the single core bottleneck
*CPU Limited" means game logic runs longer than graphics.
Being limited by single core performance does not mean that you will see one of your CPU cores at 100% at all times. The CPU scheduler will move threads from cores constantly for various reasons. So if you run a game that completely uses one thread only, you will still see your utilization of cores jumping around and "averaging out", instead of one of the cores being stuck at 100% like one might expect. It IS possible to "pin" a thread to a specific CPU core so it never changes cores, but doing that is generally a really bad idea unless there is no variability in your operating environment at all, so it's never done on PC, but often done on consoles.
Didn't expect it to be so heavily CPU limited. Absolutely mind boggling that the PS5 and Series X run it at low view distance. Feels like there is something horribly wrong optimization wise in the engine that needs to be deep fixed
How is it mind boggling? the consoles have weak cpus by todays standards but thats no excuse for being released in this state
@@TheJms1977 Because the game is a performance/optimization mess. Vast majority of games don't exhibit this behavior. And while PS5 and Series S/X are far from the most powerful things in the world there's no reason a game should look and play significantly worse on then versus similar PS3/PS4 games
Great analysis, Alex, you're a real PRO!
I was waiting for this video from you guys over at DF. I knew this game was gonna have some serious performance issues across the board. I'm glad this video shows my speculation was correct. Seventy dollars saved.
This video perfectly summarized that the game is basically hindered by Unreal Engine. (The comparison with Spider-Man, Watch-Dogs and Cyberpunk just confirms this, as they are using proprietary engine). All the issues listed in the video (streaming heavily holding back CPU, poor multi-core usage, shader compilation) are standard UE3 - UE4 problems (I cannot speak about UE5, I have limited experience with it). Of course a super talented team can fix these issues (as Rocksteady proved it with UE3), I dunno why WB Games Montreal did not put more emphasis on fixing these problems. Having worked with UE3, UE4 and briefly with UE5 I can confidently state that an out-of-the-box Unreal Engine is rarely suitable for your game's needs, they need heavy customization. I am very skeptical seeing a bunch of game companies throwing away their proprietary engines and switching to Unreal, I am afraid we might be seeing a ton of games with Gotham Knights type of performance in the future.
UE5 might be different judging by how well it renders massive maps like in the Matrix demo.
Never knew PS5 only reserved 6.5 (so, 13 thread?) for games at 2:01 . Very interesting are there any source for this?
DF source for this is unknown. They've talked about their access to the SDK documentation of PS and how they are talking to developers for various topics in the past. How much ressources are allocated is under NDA for Switch, Xbox and PS. DF won't be able to tell you specifics, without getting their source in trouble.
@@Baldur452 oh that makes sense! thank you for your comment :)
You forgot to mention that PS5 CPU runs with high latency GDDR6, which has a severe penalty on games. You can probably buy what they call a "4700S" which is basically a PS5 with the graphics disabled-- right might enjoy looking into it. Runs on windows with GDDR6 and has 146ns of latency ( ! ) on AIDA64
I have a sealed copy of the game picked up on launch day, will be returning it maybe to pick it up when its 90% off in less than a year with hopefully some fixes.
Just a masterclass of a video, DF has the best reputation and they sure earned it
Thanks for the video Alex!
Oh man Alex doing the lords work going over the performance in such details.
A fantastic video giving us great insight!
The amount of work/time this took is impressive. How many test machines do you have? Please tell me it's more than 1.
Refunded this dogshit. Got 45fps average with drop on 1080p low setting on my rtx 3070. Glad I did.
Would have been nice to see the 12900k w/ 2060 just for curiosity sake..
It would suck, just like every other combo. That's the point Alex is trying to make
After turning on FSR in the settings, the game ran much smoother for me. Without FSR, it ran like crap with settings at medium. With FSR on, I can put the settings to the highest setting, and it's mostly running at 60 FPS. And I only have a Vega 56.
Are the Zen 2 cpus in the PS5 and Series S and X based on the laptop versions or Desktop APU’s hence the 8mb of L3 Cache compared to the 32mb of L3 cache in the Ryzen 5 3600.
Curious if they'll ever fix their issues or if they are gonna just go "nah we're cool" and leave it alone and go onto their next thing.
considering that mode they’re adding next month i think they’ll fix some stuff fingers crossed
They’ve started pushing patches on for PC. I hope they clean up the console versions too.
Such a shame. I think this game was rushed in order to avoid GOW launch window. This team did an exceptional job with Batman Arkham origins, so I am sure that wil more time in their hands they could have fixed all these. It is like if the game has being released in Beta phase.
It's not the arkham origins team. Maybe some of the people who worked on origins were there but most of them are probably gone. The gotham knights' team mostly consists of ex Ubisoft devs even creative director is from ubisoft.
Are there too many shaders to compile them all right before the game starts? How do other games avoid these drops (especially open world ones)? Are there a ton more shaders than most games have, or is it just poorly timed compilation?
He says completely loaded but the threads are usually between 60% and 80% utilization. Is that normal for CPUs for some reason? Are other PC processes using the remaining ~25% or something?
Probably a draw call issue, open world games like this need very carefully managed draw calls. So it would require a systematic overhaul to further optimize the draw calls. Other open world games that look better are able to get better performance.
this game was supposedly a "game as a service" thing with the focus on online coop gaming, looting, grinding and stuff , the UE4 isn't that good with streaming textures and draw calls , and on a server with other players and bots being managed by the CPU , it's even worse , that's what's causing the issues , when the decision was made to make it a single player game rather than an online game as a service , they didn't have much time to rewrite the code to make a proper switch from a type of a game to another , and it's end up being a disaster !
@@wizzenberry UE3 or 4 never were ment to be openworld engines because of a very bad textures streaming tech , but with nanites in UE5 they finally fixed this issue .
@@wizzenberry it has to be , it will be the main engine for the vast majority of future games, i'm exited for games like Wukong :Black myth or Atomic Hearth and Stalker 2 , all using the UE5...
@@offlinegamer6756 It's not the engine, remember that Fortnite is built on UE and is a major multiplayer open world game and it runs on mobile. The developer needs to know how to get the most out of it, but I've noticed that many developers have difficulty with that. It can be difficult to run down everything that's impacting performance and many things are enabled by default in UE that may not even be needed by the game.
Denuvo is also hitting the performance on CPU, the leaked Denuvo-less version of the game gives 5 FPS more.
Didn't they remove Denuvo today?
@@cybervoid8442 yeah they did
I was also wondering about Denuvo possibly impacting performance, I wish companies stopped using that crap.
Using Denuvo is actually driving more people to pirated games that have it removed and offer a better experience than the retail version that includes Denuvo.
Explains all the issues I had when reviewing this - I am due for a cpu upgrade and figured this was the case as I had to lock my game to 45 fps to have something stable. That’s with a 3080.
Good news, my new cpu arrived this week
I have a 3600 / 3080 combo and it's great for anything. Seeing this is just bad game optimisation. Maybe in a few updates this could change but no way i'm changing my combo.
I wonder why we're having asset streaming issues on PC when we have large amounts of RAM available. In many open world games I see my SSD being constantly utilized streaming stuff while not even half of my 32GB of ram is occupied. Why aren't these games loading more assets into Ram instead of constantly accessing the SSD?
Holy moly this is the first time I see Alex butchered devs lmao they messed up big time.
The camera movement stutters is eerily the same experience I have with most Windows-only games I play on Linux through Proton. I say this because, on Linux, games usually have to compile their shaders before you even start the game, otherwise you will deal with a stuttering mess when loading new areas. Only when the shaders are compiled (i.e. done playing for the first time in a new area) will the stutters disappear.
Yup. I just fired the game up again after installing new drivers and of course it did the same shader compilation thing again it did at the start. I remember being really worried the game was going to be a slideshow when it happened the first time. All they needed to do was a one-time start-up shader compilation before booting into the game.
That all they needed to do step is not a very easy thing to do, not in UE4. I am not excusing them, but don't expect it to be a one day programming gig, it's a serious issue and the later on into the development you are on your UE 4 game, the longer it will take to fix.
Couldn't they just generate shaders the first time the game is loaded on your specific hardware? I feel like that's a thing I've seen in games before.
The devs: We couldn't optimize the game so we must blame the console's hardware
The developer blaming the series s didn't work for the studio. He worked for Rocksteady.
plague tale runs fine on old pc hardware but runs 30fps on consoles lol, in the case of gotham knights u r right though. them console be shit tho lol 120fps my arse
Turns out that the developers were a bunch of potatoes
this game is another example of you only see something because you are looking for it. many of the issues that people claim are there visually, I can not see, even when side by side comparisons are shown
Great breakdown, well done again.