Batman Arkham Knight Performance Review
Batman Arkham Knight Integrated Performance Benchmark
Batman Arkham Knight has an integrated benchmark that runs through various scenes to provide the user and idea of what their system is capable of. While it won’t account for the random nature of the game, at least it provides a nice way to compare computer hardware.
As Batman Arkham Knight is a console port, it is frame locked to 30FPS. Depending on your PC configuration, you should be able to get a higher FPS. There is no way to adjust this while playing the game, however you can make a change to a configuration file to enable a higher possible frame rate. Edit the file “…\Steam\steamapps\common\Batman Arkham Knight\) and look in there for BmGame\Config\BmSystemSettings.ini” and update the entry “MaxFPS” to the desired limit. For our testing, this was set to 90FPS. Thankfully, the integrated benchmark does not utilize the built-in Frame Lock, which is why once we set the lock to 90FPS, we were able to achieve scores above that limit.
With just under 5% performance difference between running the built-in Batman Arkham Knight benchmark on both graphics cards without Gameworks there doesn’t seem to be a bad choice in graphics cards. At 1080p the GTX 970 dropped from an average 81FPS to 56FPS once Gameworks was fully enabled; close to a 45% drop. While that’s a big drop in FPS, 56FPS is still very playable.
At 1080p, the GTX 970 was slightly behind the Nitro 390, bumping up the resolution, we see that change with the GTX 970 taking a slight lead over the Nitro 390. Granted, it’s only 2FPS or 3% difference in performance, so not a game changer by any means. Enabling Gameworks, FPS took a massive nosedive from 64FPS on average to 42FPS, just over 50% difference in FPS by enabling Gameworks. At 42FPS, gameplay is still smooth and flawless.
At the highest resolution, 3840 x 2160 we see the biggest difference in performance with the NVIDIA based GTX 970 taking a 6% lead over the AMD 390; however 2FPS isn’t a huge difference in reality. Once we enabled Gameworks, we saw almost a 37.5% difference in performance on the GTX 970. Unfortunately, 4K is still too much for the GTX 970 to handle with Gameworks enabled.