Gotham Knights Performance Has Much Improved from Launch

wccftech.com:

Between the last few months of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, a lot of PC games launched in a problematic state (mostly due to the now infamous shader compilation stuttering), including Gotham Knights from Warner Bros. Games Montréal.

In my review of the game, I wrote:

Lastly, we get the real thorn in Gotham Knights' side: its performance. Worries began circulating even ahead of its launch after it became known that there would be no Performance Mode, limiting frame rate to 30FPS on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X. We reviewed the game on PC, where the performance was greatly hampered by stuttering, especially when moving quickly through the city with the grappling hook or the Batcycle.

Even with DLSS (2.0) set to Performance Mode and ray tracing turned off (by the way, you cannot turn on lighting, shadows, or reflections, it's either all disabled or enabled), the gameplay experience was far from smooth on a powerful hardware equipped with an RTX 3090 GPU and an i7 12700KF CPU. When trying to activate ray tracing, the experience got worse even with DLSS on Ultra Performance mode (at 4K, that means rendering from a base of 720p).

The Unreal Engine 4 powered visuals are more than satisfying even without ray tracing, but it's nonetheless disappointing that such a configuration would suffer similar struggles.

It was the low point of the so-called #StutterStruggle for PC gamers. Thankfully, several of those titles have since been updated to fix the shader compilation stuttering and improve the overall optimization. Gotham Knights in particular received a lot of patches, the most recent of which from February 15th prompted Digital Foundry to re-review the game due to the extent of the improvements. The game didn't just