DF Weekly: Arkham Knight on Switch is disastrously poor

This week’s DF Direct Weekly kicks off with our ‘hot take’ on the state of Batman: Arkham Trilogy on Nintendo Switch. We film the show on Friday morning and so only had an hour or so with the game before we sat down to record, but we had to know the answer to one burning question: can Nintendo’s handheld hybrid really run Batman: Arkham Knight? Hopes were high for another ‘impossible port’ but alas, the final game is practically a disaster, brutally cutback in every conceivable way and plagued with profound stuttering problems.

Lighting is savagely downgraded, texture quality is a total mess, shadows take a trip back to PS2 era standards and geometry is culled. Arkham Knight routinely fails to hit its 30 frames per second target, often lingering in the low to mid-20s but worse than that is the pervasive stuttering problem. Most strongly evident in the Batmobile sections, Arkham Knight is clearly facing system-level bottlenecks at every turn: streaming environmental detail at speeds has a clearly measurable impact on the CPU, while the addition of collision physics stacks on top of that, taking performance into the teens.

We’ve got a deeper tech review coming soon, but ultimately, this collection should never have shipped. The quality of the porting is suspect in a world where Arkham Asylum drops frames under 30fps and where the more technologically demanding Arkham City actually seems to run better on aggregate – though of course, there are the predictable struggles in denser city scenes. There’s the sense that the first two games in the trilogy required more optimisation work while the entire Arkham Knight endeavour should have been canned, perhaps in favour of an adaptation of the often-overlooked Arkham Origins… or else the entire project put on pause until Switch’s successor finally arrives. All being well, we’re looking to deliver our full review for the Arkham Trilogy tomorrow, but having reviewed first drafts of video and text, the news doesn’t get any better – in fact, it gets a lot worse.

0:00:00 Introduction0:01:03 News 01: Arkham Knight on Switch is a disaster0:15:46 News 02: Larian boosts Baldur’s Gate 3 performance0:26:06 News 03: The Orange Box unlocked to run at 60fps on Xbox Series consoles0:37:56 News 04: Dragon’s Dogma 2 trailer released0:49:05 News 05: Cheat codes discovered for Gran Turismo PSP0:58:39 News 06: John’s VR odyssey continues!1:09:25 News 07: Duke Nukem games released for Evercade1:17:17 Supporter Q1: To play an older 360 game, is the best option original hardware plus a RetroTink, or a Series X?1:22:38 Supporter Q2: Have PC GPUs fallen behind in performance scaling relative to consoles over this generation?1:28:28 Supporter Q3: Why do some UE5 titles skip over hardware Lumen, even on PC?1:32:30 Supporter Q4: Could Sony improve the PS Portal with software updates?1:41:29 Supporter Q5: Could frame generation be used to improve motion blur?

There’s better news elsewhere in this week’s DF Direct Weekly as Alex spent some time getting to grips with the fifth patch for Baldur’s Gate 3 – and of course, our first port of call would be Act Three, set within the city of Baldur’s Gate itself. Larian has discussed a strong optimisation push, some of it dictated by the need to get the game working on Xbox Series S, but the bottom line is that our mainstream CPU champion – the Ryzen 5 3600 gains around 22 percent in performance compared to our launch metrics. Frame-time consistency is improved too, seemingly down to optimisation of the earthquake systems that caused real issues on the launch game – though this may have been fixed before patch five, of course. While the game is still some way off 60 frames per second, what this does mean is that less strenuous content is now more likely to hit the target, while more capable CPUs are also likely to see a boost, and again, 60fps locked may be more attainable.