Five months on, an altogether more positive DF tech analysis.
Gotham Knightshad some definite issues when it launched last year.
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.
Going back to the initial release, it had three key problems.
Firstly, the game was frequently beset by conventional frame-rate issues.
Secondly, Gotham Knights had issues with frame delivery.
These issues made Gotham Knights' 30fps frame-rate target feel messy and sort of broken.
However, after a concerted patching effort, the situation has been dramatically improved.
Looking at the PS5 release, we’re getting close to a locked 30fps.
Interior scenes play back without any issues whatsoever, absent of the frame-time troubles we observed at launch.
The choppy, inconsistent motion has been completely solved here - it’s a huge upgrade.
Open-world traversal, where the launch release suffered most, is also very stable.
Long stretches run at a perfect 30fps, even when speeding through Gotham City on the Batcycle.
For all practical purposes, open world gameplay just hugs that 30fps update.
The new version brings a night-and-day improvement, and is ultimately a much more enjoyable experience.
The Xbox consoles follow much the same pattern.
Interior scenes run at a locked 30fps, with outdoor scenes not entirely perfect but much improved.
Both Series S and X feel much better to play than in their initial forms.
Hopefully this can be fixed, as it is distracting.
So the consoles are much more consistent performers as of recent updates - so what exactly has changed?
Patch notes mention the inclusion of dynamic resolution scaling, though the impact of that is limited.
What seems to have happened with Gotham Knights then is genuine optimisation, particularly on the CPU side.
This is most demonstrable on PC, where we can unlock frame-rates and let the game run riot.
Gotham Knights also suffered from serious shader compilation issues during the game’s early sections.
Ultimately, Gotham Knights is best understood as a game of two halves, visually speaking.
The first half is the game’s mission environments.
Lighting is a particular standout in these environments.
Assets also impress here.
Again, this isn’t generation-defining stuff but geometric density and texture resolution are both suitably high.
If you just evaluated Gotham Knights on the interiors alone, it would seem like a very good-looking game.
A lot of my concerns here really come down to lighting quality.
Gotham Knights' open world does have a lot of light sources but ambient lighting basically seems non-existent.
The overall impression is that GI is largely missing in the open world environment.
Gotham is also home to some of the more bland gameplay elements in Gotham Knights.
The batcycle also feels ponderously slow, taking too long to traverse the game’s broad city streets.
