Gotham Knights is fixed – so we've re-reviewed every version of the game

Gotham Knights had some definite issues when it launched last year. A mixture of lighting problems, odd technical hangups, and strange design choices undermined what should have been an attractive game. This was made all the worse from comparisons to its 2015 predecessor, Batman: Arkham Knight, which was in many ways a more visually accomplished title. But the game’s key issue came down to performance, running at a highly unsteady 30fps, with harsh frame-rate drops, stutters, and frame-time fluctuations. The game felt rough and jerky as a result, particularly when travelling through the open world. For a current-gen only title pushing unambitious visuals, this level of performance bordered on unforgivable.

It’s not often that we produce re-reviews of games on Digital Foundry – the constraints on our time are just too heavy – and this does mean that sometimes welcome technical improvements lack the attention they deserve. We’re going to make an exception for Gotham Knights though, because while our coverage was harsh but fair at the time, five months of patches have radically transformed the game – for the better.

Going back to the initial release, it had three key problems. Firstly, the game was frequently beset by conventional frame-rate issues. Gotham Knights tended to buckle when traversing through the open world, with harsh drops often characterised by stutters as high as 83 milliseconds or so. Performance profiling on the PC version revealed that most of these problems were CPU related though the game could exhibit more stable, extended frame-rate dips where it seemed GPU-bound.

Secondly, Gotham Knights had issues with frame delivery. You’d see a mix of 16, 33, and 50 millisecond frames in general gameplay even when the overall frame-rate was pegged to 30fps. The game never really felt truly stable, with bizarre frame-time fluctuations that came as a byproduct of the studios’ chosen frame-rate capping method. Finally, the game would occasionally chug with no clear driving factor, like in the train terminals where performance could inexplicably drop into the low 20s, frame-rate wise. Gotham Knights had some issues with bugs and general stability, and that extended to some baffling problems in select areas at times.