Warner Bros. just released a new trailer to tell you how beautiful Gotham Knights will be on your PC, as if to reassure everyone that this time, it’s getting the PC version right. Back in 2015, the publisher’s PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight was so famously bad that it pulled the game from Steam until it could implement fixes. This time, Warner is making its promises about the PC port up front. If the trailer’s promises hold up, then you can expect to see every individual pore on Robin’s face.
The new trailer boasts support for high framerates, 4K resolution, ray-traced reflections, ultra-wide and multi-monitor support, and all the graphics customization options PC players expect in a good port. Perhaps the most unusual callout is for Intel’s brand-new XeSS upscaling, which uses machine learning to render at a lower resolution and then (attempt to) upscale the image with good quality, which lets you hit higher framerates at higher resolutions. In other words, it’s Intel’s answer to Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR, and it’ll be interesting to see how it performs.
Given its next-gen nature, you’re probably going to need a pretty good computer to run this game. Unfortunately, Gotham Knights’s system requirements are currently listed as “TBD”, so you’ll have to wait a little longer to find out if your machine is too potato to run the game at a consistent framerate.
There could be a good reason why a PC-version hype video is dropping so early. Seven years ago, the launch version of Arkham Knight on PC had so many performance issues that Warner Bros pulled the game from Steam a month after its release. Players reported stuttering, game crashes, and a framerate that capped at 30, just like the console versions’. Kotaku reported that most of the studio’s development resources were dedicated to fixing console issues, and Rocksteady avoided using external stress-testing firms in order to avoid story leaks.
To add one more wrinkle, four months ago Warner Bros. announced that it would be scrapping the PS4 and Xbox One versions of Gotham Knights, both because the older hardware couldn’t keep up with the game’s co-op focus and to concentrate development resources exclusively on the higher-end platforms. The game had also previously been delayed from its release window of 2021.
Gotham Knights will release on October 21 for the Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, Steam, and the Epic Games Store.