Batman: Arkham City Performance After The DX11 Patch

Batman: Arkham City Gets Patched

Warner Bros. Interactive and Rocksteady Studios really dropped the ball when it came to the PC version of Batman: Arkham City as it had some serious issues from day one. This NVIDIA backed DirectX 11 game title was released on PC well after consoles and the DirectX 11 mode was so broken the developer said not to run the game in DX11.

This came as a huge shock to most gamers and it even caught us off guard as we were briefed by NVIDIA on November 8th about how well their graphics cards performed in the game title Batman: Arkham City. How the game went ‘gold’ and was shipped on November 22nd, 2011 in a broken state is still rather amazing as it appears to have been tested by NVIDIA weeks before it shipped. The day the game was launched PC users were told to run the game in DirectX 9 mode. Despite the DirectX 11 issues the game has received universal critical acclaim, making it one of the highest rated video games released in 2011.

It took nearly two weeks, but on December 7th, 2011 a patch was released for Batman: Arkham City that ‘fixed’ DX11 performance, but only for those running 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows. Those running 32-bit versions of the operating system will have to wait for another patch that will come at a future date.

Major Fixes in Dec. 7th Batman: Arkham City PC Patch:

• Performance / hitching issues have been greatly improved for running in DX 11.
• An issue with players running out of Video Memory or encountering a Rendering Thread Exceptions has been address. This was primarily affecting 32-bit Operating Systems.
• A progression block after defeating Ras Al Ghul has been fixed. This was issue occurred primarily on lower end computer setups and described as Batman not readying his Reverse Batarang.
• A crash that occurred when scrolling between the Character Bios and Arkham City Stories has been fixed.
• A crash that occurred when selecting Press Start immediately when available at the Title Screen has been fixed. The issue was described as crashing/hard locking around the DLC (Downloadable Content) check.

We played the game on the patch with various card and while single GPU gaming in DX11 mode on Batman: Arkham City has greatly improved we did still find some issues. For example we had issues with NVIDIA 3D Vision and NVIDIA 3D Surround on the game title in DX11 mode. Something is still wrong there and it will need to be patched at a future date.

Enough of the small talk! Let’s benchmark in DX11 mode with HBAO, MVSS and high tessellation enabled and see what the patch does in terms of performance!