Gotham Knights tech guide: Optimal settings for best performance on PC

Gotham Knights, the highly awaited action-adventure game from WB Games Montreal, also known for their work in creating Batman Arkham Origins, has finally been released. Despite apparent similarities to Rocksteady's Batman Arkham games, Gotham Knights is an entirely separate and unique experience in terms of both narrative and gameplay.

The game was previously planned for release as a cross-generation title, aiming for both current and last-generation console hardware. However, developer WB Games Montreal later confirmed that due to the ambitious nature of the title, its open world, and visual fidelity, Gotham Knights will be released only on current-generation consoles, i.e., PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, as well as PC.

While built on Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4, it is heavily modified to allow support for modern graphical techniques like ray-traced shadows, reflections, advanced global illumination, and more, which can highly taxing on both consoles and PCs. Even without RT features, the game looks stunningly beautiful and thus is very demanding when it comes to PC hardware.

Fortunately, the game offers handy graphics options for players on PC in order to tweak the game's visuals to get the best possible performance from their hardware. Here's a comprehensive guide on how players can optimize Gotham Knights on PC for the best performance and gameplay experience.

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PC optimization guide for Gotham Knights to get the best performance

First things first, players should ensure their PCs meet the minimum requirements listed by WB Games in order to run Gotham Knights. While it is entirely possible to run the game with hardware below the minimum specifications listed for the game, the experience is far from ideal.

In our time with the game, we found that while it does require a beefy enough GPU, Gotham Knights can work quite comfortably on a mid-range 4-gigabyte card, such as a GTX 1650 Super. However, the game is heavily CPU-dependent, requiring some top-of-the-line processors to play the game at a smooth framerate.

This is also reflected in the game's minimum system requirements that ask for an Intel Core i5 9600K, a 6-core mid-range CPU. Having a lower-tier CPU will result in frequent game crashes and uneven frame times, especially in the open-world sections of the game.

Here are the minimum system requirements for Gotham Knights:

• OS: Windows 10 64-bit
• Processor: Intel Core i5-9600K (3.7 GHz) OR AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (3.60 GHz)
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti OR AMD Radeon RX 590
• DirectX: Version 12
• Storage: 45 GB available space

Here are the recommended system requirements for Gotham Knights:

• OS: Windows 10 64-bit
• Processor: Intel Core i7-10700K (3.8 GHz) or AMD Ryzen 5 5600X (3.7 GHz)
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 or AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
• DirectX: Version 12
• Storage: 45 GB available space

WB Games Montreal also mentioned that the minimum system specifications would allow players to play the game at low graphics preset, at 1920x1080 resolution and 60fps. While the target resolution and framerate are true, players can easily toggle the graphics to medium with a GTX 1660ti and Ryzen 5 3600.

The recommended requirements, on the other hand, will allow players to crank the settings up to high while maintaining a smooth 60fps at 1080p resolution.

It is also very much recommended that players install the game on an SSD instead of a traditional hard drive since the game's open-world sections generally require high texture streaming bandwidth for fast and seamless asset loading.

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Graphics options available in Gotham Knights for players to tweak

Gotham Knights offers a host of graphical options for players to tweak and customize their experience. From modern upscaling and image sharpening solutions to framerate caps for lower-end CPUs that might struggle with asset streaming in the game's expansive open-world exploration segments.

There are a few quality-of-life visual options as well, which players can turn on or off depending on their preference with any tangible impact on performance, those being:

• Motion Blur: This setting has minimal effect on performance and can be left on for players that like the effect. While the game does not specify the type of motion blur implemented, it seems to be per-object motion blur that looks good on big-screen TVs but can feel odd and jarring in high refresh rate monitors.
• Ambient Occlusion: While this setting is known to be taxing in most games, especially on the CPU end, ambient occlusion implementation in Gotham Knights is not tied to shadows and, thus, is much less demanding.
• Bloom: This option has no visible impact on the framerate and can be left on.
• Chromatic Abberation: This setting, too, has no impact on performance and can be left on.

Now, for the settings that noticeably affect performance and will need to be tweaked individually to get the desired performance out of the game:

• Texture Quality: While this setting has minimal impact on CPU performance, it dictates how much GPU VRAM will be used by the game. For a 6-gigabyte card, Gotham Knights defaults to medium. However, players can crank it up to high if they lower shadows and environmental density and enable FSR with a framerate cap.
• Anti-aliasing: The game has a few options for AA, including two forms of TAA and FXAA. However, TAA is only effective with FidelityFX sharpening enabled or with FSR upscaling. FXAA, as always, looks significantly worse than TAA and thus should be avoided unless players are getting performance issues with the TAA options.
• Shadow Quality: Shadows in Gotham Knights are easily one of the most demanding graphical options in the game. It will tax both the CPU and the GPU, especially in the open-world sections with dynamically cast shadows of buildings and other assets as players zoom past different map zones while exploring Gotham.
• Environment Density: Along with shadows, environmental density is another one of the taxing options that should be left on low unless players use a top-tier CPU. It heavily impacts the detail drawn in the open world while exploring. There is also a bug in the game as of writing, where the setting resets every time the game is shut down. Manually configuring the setting to the lowest value in the config file helps with this issue.
• Particle Effects: Although it has minimal effect on performance for the hardware recommended by WB Games for Gotham Knights, it can be very taxing for players running the game on lower-end graphics cards with limited VRAM.
• Lighting: This option, while not as taxing as shadows or environmental density, still significantly impacts performance on GPUs with less than 6 gigabytes of VRAM.
• Ray Tracing: This setting will remain greyed out for players without a ray-tracing capable card. However, it is very taxing even for the top-of-the-line RTX GPUs, given much like Cyberpunk 2077, the game uses ray-traced reflections as well as shadows to enhance the already breathtaking visuals.
• Field of View: The FOV defaults to 80, and for a good reason, that is giving the system fewer assets to load per frame during gameplay. While players can increase the FOV to 90 for a better gameplay experience, anything beyond that is not recommended and has a tangible impact on performance.

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Optimal settings for best performance in Gotham Knights

While the visuals of Gotham Knights are spectacular, especially for an open-world game with a fixed time of day, the title can benefit from a few updates fixing the performance on PC.

For anyone with a powerful enough PC, surpassing the game's recommended requirements should not be much of an issue. However, to run the game at a smooth and stable framerate, anyone below those hefty specs will need to tweak the game a fair bit to achieve a playable framerate.

Here are the optimized settings players can use to get the best performance on Gotham Knights:

• Texture Quality: High
• Anti-aliasing: TAA Gen5
• Shadow Quality: Low
• Environment Density: Low
• Particle Effects: Medium
• Lighting: Medium
• Ray Tracing: Off
• Field of View: 90 (or at default)
• Motion Blur: On/Off / Upto preference
• Ambient Occlusion: On
• Bloom: On/Off / Upto preference
• Chromatic Abberation: On/Off / Upto preference

Along with these settings, players should use the upscaling solutions available, be it AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.0, Nvidia's DLSS, or Intel's XeSS, along with a 60fps cap.

We tested these settings on a PC with an Intel Core i5 8700K processor paired with Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super GPU and 16 gigabytes of DDR4 memory, with the game installed on a Gen4 NVMe drive, and mostly received a locked 60fps experience at 1080p resolution, with FSR enabled at Quality preset.

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Gotham Knights is available now for Windows PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.