Bruce On The Wane: Arkham City DX11 Woes
Batman: Arkham City is now playable on Steam, after a week of mild confusion over its availability in various regions. However, more pressing concerns have arisen now that it's been properly released: the DX11 support seems to be as broken as the bat after a few rounds with Bane, rendering Brucie's latest adventure unplayable with the current DirectX package.
The main issue seems to be that having DX11 enabled turns Arkham City into a juddering, stuttering mess with wildly fluctuating framerates. My copy is still downloading as I'm writing this, but our Adam has played it and reports exactly that, and it's an experience shared with those on the Steam forums. The chaps over at HardOCP have an in-depth rundown of Arkham City's performance on an NVidia GTX 580 and an AMD Radeon HD 6970 and it's pretty damning, stating that "with both video cards the game stuttered and paused in exactly the same places, indicating it is more of a game issue with DX11."
An official post on the Arkham City forums recognises the issue, and goes on to say that "We’re working on a title update to address this matter and expect to make it available in the near future."
In the meantime we're left with turning off DX11 in favour of the good old dependable DX9, the how-to documented in the same forum post:
Instructions for changing DX 11 to DX 9
The Launcher can be accessed on Games for Windows LIVE and Steam to change DX 11 to DX 9 in the Settings menu.
Change both DirectX 11 Features and DirectX 11 Tessellation to OFF.Games for Windows LIVE
Start > All Programs > Games > Right click on Batman: Arkham City and select Launcher > Settings
1. Open the Start Menu
2. Select All Programs and then the Games folder
3. Right click on Batman: Arkham City and select Launcher
4. Choose Settings then click on the arrow next to DX options to changeSteam:
Launch Steam Client > Library > Right click on Batman: Arkham City > Configure PC Options
1. Open Steam
2. Select Library
3. Right click on Batman: Arkham City and select Configure PC Options
4. Choose Settings then click on the arrow next to DX options to change
Adam does say that with DX11 turned off, Arkham City runs as smooth as butter under DX9. The whole mess is a shame, moreso with the trailer campaign so keen to stress how fancy the PC experience would be. Adam's WIT will be up shortly, so we'll soon see if he thinks the hassle is worth it.