Batman: Return to Arkham on PS4 Pro it’s a game that boosts performance but nothing else. It’s as if developer Virtuos simply pulled a switch to enable PS4 Pro’s additional CPU and GPU power on its base title with little regard as to what would actually happen. The results are predictably variable and rather poor overall.
The vast majority of console games operate with a frame-rate limit of some description, typically 30fps or 60fps, meaning that the extra Pro power could simply be utilised to stabilise performance where base hardware can’t meet the target, with this being the case of Return to Arkham.
Batman: Return to Arkham actually has two titles that could help to isolate what the additional resources could achieve. Arkham Asylum operates with a wobbly 30fps cap, while Arkham City actually operates with an unlocked frame-rate that caps only at 60fps, bearing in mind that the first Batman title is actually far less impactful on system resources. Arkham City offers no resolution or effects upgrades. It just runs faster, but it’s actually the variation in the boosts available that proves most fascinating.
Check this trailer down below:
First impressions are certainly favourable – Arkham City’s prologue, featuring Catwoman’s capture at the hands of Two-Face witnesses an immediate, dramatic improvement. Frame-rates in the low 40s on base hardware move up to 60fps, with just the odd dropped frame. The results are actually quite similar to that seen on the inFamous titles, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Knack, all which allow for unlocked performance with no visual upgrades – PS4 Pro may well have 2.3x the GPU power, but clearly there are system bottlenecks elsewhere. None of these games can sustain a locked 60fps.
Whether it’s CPU power, storage IO limitations or memory bandwidth, it’s clear that simply unlocking the Pro’s GPU with an eye towards raw performance isn’t the best use of the hardware, and Arkham City’s breathtaking lack of optimisation actually proves valuable in isolating specific bottlenecks where the additional GPU power has no impact whatsoever. Consider the first fly-by cut-scene of Arkham City itself as the camera swoops through the street, halting just outside the courthouse where Catwoman is being held capture. Performance on base hardware bottoms out at a miserable 19fps. The Pro advantage? A mere six frames per second boost.
Something is holding the title back and the maths are illuminating – the Pro’s 2.1GHz CPU clock-speed represents a 31 per cent increase in frequency, and this seems to account precisely for the frame-rate differential here between the same Arkham City scene rendering on base hardware and in Pro mode. But regardless, it is an improvement, and other areas that drop below 30fps on base hardware remain above that threshold on Pro.
In this scene, the Pro manages just a 6fps uplift over the base PS4. The numbers correspond to the 31 per cent increase in CPU power in the new console, suggesting that the AMD Jaguars are the limiting factor in this scene.
And that’s important – because if it were possible to deploy Pro speeds on unpatched PS4 games, maintaining 30fps and ironing out performance drops beneath would almost certainly be the number one use-case scenario, followed by a tighter lock on 60fps title where that’s the performance target. Last, but not least, we should see dynamic resolutions stay closer to 1080p. Curiously, Batman Arkham City does use this too, but isolating areas where there are drops proved troublesome – our test clips all seem to operate at full 1080p, even when performance is crippled. If CPU is the primary limiting factor in many city scenes, as the evidence suggests, you have to wonder if dynamic scaling would help this title much at all.
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