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Games Hardware

Batman Demands 12GB RAM For Windows 10 (steamcommunity.com) 309

Posted by timothy from the batman-is-always-demanding-things dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Back in June, Warner Brothers removed Batman: Arkham Knight from sale after a lot of graphics and performance issues found on the PC version. Now, after spending five months trying to fix this mess, Rocksteady and Warner Bros re-released the game on Steam with some free Batman titles for those who acquired the launch edition. However, Warner Bros noted there are still a few caveats with Windows 10 users recommended to have 12GB of RAM to avoid paging issues: "For Windows 10 users, we've found that having at least 12GB of system RAM on a PC allows the game to operate without paging and provides a smoother gameplay experience." Some initial tests show no performance gains on the re-released version. Warner Bros claims that it's still working closely with its GPU partners in order to enable SLI/Crossfire for the game.
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Batman Demands 12GB RAM For Windows 10 More

Batman Demands 12GB RAM For Windows 10

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  • Exactly for what do we need 12 gigs of ram? I had more issues with the code then I did graphics..... To me it still feels the same as the old engine I still scratch my head sometimes thinking what did they improve? Did this even help with the user experience?

    • Re:For what? (Score:5, Funny)

      by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Thursday October 29, 2015 @05:27PM (#50828493)
      Naughty bits. What else do you expect from Joker & Company?
    • They're probably loading everything into RAM all at once so there's no "loading, please wait" screen if you move through areas too quickly. HDD access can be a pain when you're throwing high resolution textures on every little mesh.

      • I think I'll just keep playing Civ I under DOSemu :)

        • I think I'll just keep playing Civ I under DOSemu :)

          I prefer Civ 2 on WinXP under vmware... (civ2 seems to punch lots of vms in the nuts, but not vmware.)

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          You should try freeciv [freeciv.org]. It kicks ass.

      • except textures are pretty shit, there are no high resolution textures in this game from PC point of view

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Quarters ( 18322 )

        So how do you explain superior performance on consoles, then? And no, there isn't 11GBs worth of texture data difference between the PS4/XB1 and PC versions.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, fortunately I returned my STEAM copy. Come to think of it, the Batmobil got on my nerves pretty soon in addition to the graphics breaking immersion all the time. Will not buy again. Well, maybe a $5 nice-price in a few years.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      There is a vast difference in the engine apparent the moment you stand on a rooftop and look out for miles in each direction, or where you walk through a door and the game keeps going instead of stopping at a load screen. Or when there is a cutscene and rather than play a video, the cutscene happens within the game. There are a few moments where there are transitions, e.g. going down a lift where its obviously loading up something but generally it feels seamless.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by RichMan ( 8097 )

      For the OS. The OS needs 8G. That leaves 4G for the game. Mostly textures and polygons.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by slaker ( 53818 )

        Windows memory requirements haven't changed since Vista. Windows 10 actually runs surprisingly well on 1GB RAM and for most everyday purposes there's very little subjective need to have more than 4GB on any version of Windows right now.

    • I am so angry, just like when Kings Quest 5 stopped supporting CGA Graphics cards!

  • [Technology Reqest #37,395] Need 12GB RAM (Score:5, Funny)

    by Culture20 ( 968837 ) on Thursday October 29, 2015 @05:17PM (#50828415)
    I demand 12GB of RAM now that I have upgraded the Bat-Computer to Windows 10.

    -Batman

  • Another example of bloat (Score:5, Insightful)

    by techno-vampire ( 666512 ) on Thursday October 29, 2015 @05:19PM (#50828431) Homepage
    This is nothing more than another example of something I've believed for years: if you give your devs workstations with bleeding-edge speed, the newest graphics cards and far more RAM than most consumer machines can hold, they'll produce games that can only run on their machines. Yes, it's nice to have all of that stuff to make it faster to compile and test your code, but you should also have testing machines with nothing more than a mainstream computer can be expected to have right out of the box and not ship the product until it will run properly on them.

    • Re:Another example of bloat (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 0123456 ( 636235 ) on Thursday October 29, 2015 @05:20PM (#50828443)

      My gaming PC from 2013 has 32GB. I've been waiting years for games to catch up with the hardware, but most have been crippled to run on crappy consoles.

      • Re:Another example of bloat (Score:4, Insightful)

        by tompaulco ( 629533 ) on Thursday October 29, 2015 @05:22PM (#50828451) Homepage Journal
        My gaming PC from 2011 has 8GB and I have yet to come across a title that has any problems. Of course, I don't have Batman...OR Windows 10.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by chihowa ( 366380 )

        I agree. My gaming PC from 2009 has 16 GB of RAM that sits empty while the games slowly load assets from the spinning disc at preset intervals/locations. (Loading...) The CPU sits idling while the (single threaded, 32bit) AI process makes sure not to use any of it to make better behaving enemies/NPCs.

        The only thing that is even remotely improving is the graphics, but my two seven year old middle-grade GPUs still let me play everything all maxed out.

        Everything seems to be made for consoles and refuses to eve

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by 0123456 ( 636235 )

          To be fair, the second time I load a game, it's faster, as all the files are cached in RAM. But the fscking thing still makes me wait while it plays half a dozen stupid videos, so it doesn't make that much difference.

        • while the games slowly load assets from the spinning disc

          Dude, it's 2015. You can get one of those fancy SSD drives for like $50. If you have game that's spinning your platters, load it on the SSD.

      • Re:Another example of bloat (Score:5, Insightful)

        by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Thursday October 29, 2015 @06:14PM (#50828821)
        If your computer is intended for just gaming then 32GB was a huge waste. 16GB at most is all you need even today let alone 2 years ago. games will not target such a tiny fraction of the market for years yet. It is highly unusual for a game to even utilize 8GB of ram, and Batman using 12GB is a major tech story because it is simply unheard of.

      • Why would you be trying to fill up your RAM? There's only so much RAM you can use at any given instance to render any given object on the screen. What do you get by having a game use that much? Insane load times? Heavy CPU loading? A bottlenecked PCI bus endlessly trying to push data back and forth from the graphics card because there's so much of it? Or maybe you want a game to cache to ram and load while you play directing resources away from the task of rendering your graphics just so you can get past yo

        • > What do you get by having a game use that much?

          You get to go to a 12-week "coding bootcamp" and write games. No bullshit wastes-of-time like learning how to write an efficient double-buffering routine. Just the exciting parts (and then you get to work 90-hour weeks).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Cito ( 1725214 )

        My gaming PC is pretty nice, although it's time to upgrade the graphics card.

        Intel Core I7 8 core 3.6ghz overclocked to 4ghz with a corsair water cooler

        32 gigs ram, low latency "gaming" ram

        320 gig Solid State hard drive as the system "boot" drive

        2TB Western Digital Black Hard drive for gaming/installs.

        EVGA FTW Edition GTX 670 (the ftw editions are factory overclocked)

        I haven't had ANY issues with any games Yet, but I know that graphics card needs upgrading soon.

        but Witcher 3 on max I get 80 fps average, wit

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by unrtst ( 777550 )

          My gaming PC is pretty nice, although it's time to upgrade the graphics card. ...
          EVGA FTW Edition GTX 670 (the ftw editions are factory overclocked)
          I haven't had ANY issues with any games Yet, but I know that graphics card needs upgrading soon.

          That card is (easily) in the top 27 (http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html - the GTX 670, not overclocked, is #27).
          What would you even upgrade to? Above that, most of the prices are crazy high, though the GTX 970, at $315, may be worth considering, if you happen to get some games that it would help at all, and it's worth that much for a little bit better graphics on those select games. Just curious... why do you think it's time to upgrade?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Chas ( 5144 )

      You have to love Bat-spaghetti.

    • Ya, that all makes sense and one would assume a given. However, that would take more man hours and the devs would likely have to actually spend some time writing code, rather than just cut/paste chunks in and write a few lines to tweak or bridge (not that they couldn't do it - would just mean more resource allocation). This push it out the door as soon as possible and patch later paradigm (old and tired) is lately coming around to smack them in the face for the reasons you point out. The project managers

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Comen ( 321331 )

      This game ran great on my XBOX ONE console. I game mostly on my PC with a GTX780ti. But I take my XBOX ONE with my when I got on vacation and this year played Batman and this game is truly amazing looking and played great on the XBOX. I was amazed at how well the game let me drive the Bat Mobile around the city so fast and never had a stutter or slow down really.

    • I am really curious what it is they are cashing in local RAM that is so big - Are they staging textures and models to local ram before pushing them onto the GPU? Media resources are the only thing that really bloats up a game's size, game physics and AI rules are usually pretty small.I suspect that the parent post is correct, in that the devs are kinda being lazy and not lazy loading assets on demand and just dumping everything into RAM on level load.

      May John C. come save us from bad game coders, amen.

    • Re:Another example of bloat (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday October 29, 2015 @06:04PM (#50828763) Homepage Journal

      Nah, it's just shit coding. They screwed up the memory management so need to avoid paging to prevent performance issues. It's a mistake, and one that they can't seem to fix.

    • I agree. They do test on smaller machines, but only at the end of the development cycle. Basically they're marketing to the sorts of people who spend $300 on graphics cards and who get a new machine every other year.

    • At the very least, you'd think that *someone* within the company had a machine that represented minimum or recommended specs. And hopefully those people would test the game on those machines before they released it. You could even have an entire department devoted to doing this. You could call it something like "the quality assurance department".

      • Yes, that's how it should be done. In this case, it looks as though the specs were decided by the devs, and QA had no choice but to go along.

        • Possibly. Or management decided to ship it over the objections of all the technical people involved (both developers and QA). It's hard to say. But, I do 100% agree with your original post. If you develop on cutting edge hardware, you are highly likely to produce something that needs that cutting edge hardware. I even have experience doing this: Many moons ago I convinced my boss to get me a $50k Sun workstation to develop some visualization software. I worked at Sun so, internally, that wasn't a big

    • It's just really, really hard to plan. It takes several years to develop a game. Meanwhile computer hardware is advancing. You're trying hard to hit that moving target. You don't write your game for the computer your users have today, you write it for the computer they're going to have when your game launches. Monolith got hit hard by this. They developed Shogo Mobile Armor division thinking by then everyone would have PII 300s while lots of us were stuck on 200 MMXs. Their games got bad reviews until hardw

    • Since when is 12GB RAM unusual for a new game?

      New games have always stretched older machines. Most anything bought in the last 4 years or so can be equipped with 16GB RAM or more, if you just fork out the $$$.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cfalcon ( 779563 )

        12GB is absolutely unusual for any game. Insanely so, considering that:

        > It doesn't need 12GB with Windows 7, Microsoft's final OS.
        > It doesn't need 12GB on the PS4, the top end console
        > It doesn't need 12GB on the Xbone, Microsoft's current Wii-U competitor

        Additionally, I play a decent number of games, and I don't have 12GB on my computer. Most have requirements substantially lower than that. Normally I play games on one monitor, voice chat on one monitor, and have two browsers with a couple do

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nemyst ( 1383049 )
      Except those devs overwhelmingly build with a single target in mind: consoles. They use devkits to work and do all of their testing and iterating on it. Sorry, you're flat out wrong.

      The real reason for shit like this is that publishers hand off the porting job to random crappy devs and give them untenable deadlines to do it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by enjar ( 249223 )

      I built the PC I am typing this on in 2012. 16 GB of RAM was $79 back then. The motherboard was $89, made by Intel and can support 32 GB RAM. It has USB 3.0, as well. The entire PC was built for something like $650.

      Sure it didn't have a screaming GPU or an i7, but I can add that later if I want. The bottom line is that my $650 PC build quite easily included 16 GB of RAM for less than $100, in a consumer grade motherboard. It's not outlandish.

    • Oh it's not just developers and their workstations. Give a development team access to a high speed network and they soon forget that other people aren't always accessing the website over a fast connection so you end up with bloated graphics, videos, any other files. Never mind trying to get developers to remember that your site has an international audience that includes poorer countries with bad connections and not always the best of computers. (I've had to remind the makers of a couple government websi

    • Yep, there's something to be said about that. I've been on the opposite end, though. You see, devs have to run the game in debug mode. If you don't have cutting edge machines, you can barely play the game and debug it at the same time. I've worked at a studio where we had very middle of the road machines, and the problem is that for a large portion of the dev schedule, the game is slow even in release mode. It's inefficient to optimize code while it's still being changed on a daily basis. You have to

  • is a caveat.

  • Chuckle (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nehumanuscrede ( 624750 ) on Thursday October 29, 2015 @05:26PM (#50828485)

    More evidence for the " Wait till it's been out at least a year and it's $20 on Steam before picking it up " argument.

    Never, ever pre-order anything. Ever.

    I wouldn't even give a new game a serious look until at least six months have passed. For the sole purpose of ensuring the game is playable, the servers aren't overloaded ( if an online game ) and the majority of the game killing bugs are located and remedied.

    My life isn't over if I don't get to play a game on release day. In fact, now that I think about it, my life is a whole lot less stressful if I wait and play it later.

    • Re: Chuckle (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm going to pre-order Fallout 4 in a few day. Try and stop me, Batman! Hahahahahahahahahahaaaaaa

    • https://xkcd.com/606/

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      More evidence for the " Wait till it's been out at least a year and it's $20 on Steam before picking it up " argument.

      That's a viable tactic, so long as it's not a league-licensed sports game and not from a publisher that likes to shut down the online matchmaking servers after a couple years.

    • I only preorder to reward past outstanding work (which I bought for cheap on steam), as a way to give something back.
      So far it mostly was a solid strategy.

      Of course due to backlog I never play on release day either, often when the game price finally goes down to budget it still sits untouched in the library.
      So maybe I shouldnt buy any more games at all...

  • Memory? (Score:5, Funny)

    by msauve ( 701917 ) on Thursday October 29, 2015 @05:34PM (#50828557)
    Batman is multimillionaire Bruce Wayne. He can stop demanding, and buy his own damn Bat-RAM.

  • Wolf3D, Doom, Quake... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Thursday October 29, 2015 @05:40PM (#50828591) Journal

    And here we come to the crux of what it means to be a truly great developer. Optimizations, both memory and performance, are difficult. Anyone can throw something together that is slow, bloated, and requires tons of physical resources to work half decently. Just like you can write anything you want in Visual Basic, because, after all, it is turing complete.

    So this brings me to my subject - Wolf3D, Doom and Quake. What made those games amazing weren't the algorithms. Most of the concepts, like binary spacial partitioning, and the various 3D mathematics involved to translate and transform points, etc, have been around for close to a century now. What was amazing about those games is that they ran very well on the incredibly slow and RAM-limited hardware of the era. It took tremendous amounts of pre-processing and every trick in the book for those games to be lean and mean enough to not be a slideshow and have decent rendering quality.

    Which brings us to the counter example of all of that: Batman: Arkham Knight.

    • Optimizations, both memory and performance, are difficult.

      Not difficult, but tedious and time consuming, something directly at odds with deadlines and performance KPIs pushed by management. It's not about being a truly great developer, it's about being given the opportunity to be a truly great developer.

    • Optimizations, both memory and performance, are difficult.

      And typically take older, more experienced (read: $$$$) folks to do right. H1-Bs need not apply.

  • If this lowers the price of RAM, then I'm all for it! Even better if they claim it needs 12GB of ECC.

  • Bruce Wayne can afford 12 GB and then some. His superpower is money.

  • Solves one mystery at least (Score:3)

    by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Thursday October 29, 2015 @05:52PM (#50828681)

    So that's why I keep seeing the Crucial logo projected on clouds with searchlights.

  • Wait a minute (Score:3)

    by Cro Magnon ( 467622 ) on Thursday October 29, 2015 @05:57PM (#50828715) Homepage Journal

    Is this Batman? Or Fatman?

  • When you want to run high detail photo terrain and UHD meshes. My next PC will have at least 32GB of RAM

  • ...of how out of touch the billionaire class is with the average American. Bruce Wayne should be ashamed.

  • Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fit on a 5.25" floppy.

  • sod the bloody Bat-Man (Score:5, Informative)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Thursday October 29, 2015 @06:49PM (#50829041) Journal

    If you want a game where you play a surly dude who runs around an open world kicking ass, go get Shadow of Mordor on Steam right now. It's on sale for like $17, and instead of a gay Batmobile, you get to hop on the backs of these giant beasts and behead orcs to your heart's content. And the first time you take out a warlord, you'll stand up, grab your balls and do your best Macho Man Randy Savage voice, yelling, "I did that thing. Oh yeah." With the money you'll save, you can buy a pizza and a case of beer.

    Trust me. Don't let this Arkham Knight make you feel like you're some trick who was robbed before the panties dropped. Go play Shadow of Mordor, or if you're the sort that needs the self-affirmation of paying full price for a game, get Mad Max and you can blast around the Wasteland in a Jesus-built hotrod and kick ass.

    And you won't need five fucking Cray supercomputers configured in a Beowulf cluster to play those other games. Take control of your PC gaming life for god's sake and quit sniveling.

    https://youtu.be/8C4lK41SX-Q [youtu.be]

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      a Jesus-built hotrod

      Well, ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long!

  • Oh dear oh dear (Score:3)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Thursday October 29, 2015 @07:03PM (#50829125)
    So Batman doesn't need 12GB but its recommended to avoid paging. What should we make of this other than the fact that if you turn all the settings up to max it needs a lot of memory.

  • ...of how out of touch the elite billionaire class is with the average American. Batman ought to be ashamed.

  • "Warner Bros claims that it's still working closely with its GPU partners in order to enable SLI/Crossfire for the game."
    Glad to hear they're working hard on making the game not run unless you buy more hardware. Good job, guys.

  • Obligatory Alfred quote (Score:3)

    by antifoidulus ( 807088 ) on Thursday October 29, 2015 @09:08PM (#50829755) Homepage Journal
    "Some games just want to watch your CPU burn"

  • Even my server from from 2009 has 32GB ram. I've installed 24GB and 16GB in my wife's desktop and my own years ago.
    You almost can't have too much RAM installed. Makes great cache when you're not running a big pig of a game.

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