Gotham Knights PC System Requirements Are Extremely High
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Nearly two weeks after Gotham Knights was released to the public — as a massive disappointment — its PC system requirements are still the talk of the gaming community. To play the game at high settings and at 60fps on 1080p resolutions, you’ll need a GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card, accompanied by an Intel Core i7-10700K or Ryzen 5 5600X CPU and 16GB of RAM. These are pretty steep demands for 1080p gameplay, not to mention 4K.
Additionally, most mid-tier gaming rigs come equipped with only 16GB of RAM, which implies an upgrade for anyone willing to play this game.
Crysis, a 2007 first-person-shooter released by EA, can finally retire since the nightmare of gaming hardware finally got its successor. Apparently, the previously reported 30fps lockout wasn’t such a bad idea.
According to IGN, Gotham Knights’ Steam page previously disclosed the game’s ridiculously high PC system requirements. However, the point of contention among gamers is the fact that Rocksteady’s Arkham Knight — which found its way to Switch — still looks better, despite being nearly eight years old. So, what exactly happened here, and why are these system requirements so high for a game that looks like it’s supposed to run smoothly on medium-budget systems?
Minimum requirements for Gotham Knights are more manageable and demand a GeForce GTX1060 Ti GPU accompanied by an Intel Core i5-9600K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU with 8GB of RAM. This is also quite steep for 60 fps on 1080p resolutions, with everything set to the lowest settings. By following this train of thought, it’s possible that 2K or even 4K gaming would require an RTX 30-series or AMD equivalent, and we’re talking about cards that are on the pricier end of the spectrum, like the RTX 3090.
Console players don’t have to worry about system requirements, but the aforementioned 30fps cap now seems perfectly justified — which means that WB and everyone involved may have not been accurate when they said that the implementations had something to do with cross-play on different platforms. It’s possible they were covering up for their failed optimization of the game. This all reminds us of 2007 and the release of the first Crysis game, which was so demanding that it took several years before an average gamer could afford the hardware necessary to run the game at maximum settings.
The original Crysis, unlike Gotham Knights, introduced graphical elements which were ahead of its time, and the average gaming hardware couldn’t cope with its demands. But like Gotham Knights, the original Crysis was exceptionally poorly written and optimized, which only made things worse. Due to EA’s foolishness to release the game in such a sorry state, Crysis became a meme, so any product that’s even remotely related to computing would quickly collect questions about its ability to run Crysis.
Apparently, the same thing is going on with Gotham Knights. Resolutions and frames-per-second aren’t the most reliable metrics when it comes to quality. The 1996’s Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen could be patched to run at 4K, but it has such a low pixel density that it would look considerably worse than it does in its native resolutions, which were a mere 240p and 480p, depending on the system. The aforementioned PC system requirements are quite disappointing for a game running at 1080p, which is nothing more than a byproduct of shoddy work performed at WB Games.
