Gotham Knight's performance woes on consoles continue to cause controversy, with many worried that it's the first title to signal a resurgence in 30fps gaming for the latest console hardware. The PC version - with its adjustable settings, hardware monitoring and the ability to switch out hardware - allows us to pick apart the issues, separate them, and get a better idea of what what makes this game tick. In doing so, we should be able to answer why frame-rates are capped at 30fps on consoles. The bottom line is that this game has severe CPU utilisation problems that almost certainly affect the PS5 and Xbox Series builds too, while the PC version has additional issues exclusive to that platform.
We tested the title on two different PCs - the first is our usual mid-spec gaming rig, based on the ever-popular Ryzen 5 3600 paired with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super and 3200MT/s low latency DDR4, the other featuring best-in-class components - a Core i9 12900K paired with fast 6000MT/s DDR5 and an RTX 4090. The Ryzen is especially interesting as there are similarities in CPU architecture with the CPU clusters found within PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles. In all reasonable scenarios, we seem to be CPU-limited on both systems when frame-rate is unlocked, severely limiting scalability and bringing the ceiling crashing down on overall performance.
Gotham Knights' profound CPU limitation is easy to illustrate as with the Ryzen in place, the difference between the lowest setting and the highest is a mere 10 percent of performance. Even swapping out the RTX 2060 Super for an RTX 3080 barely shifts the needle in terms of frame-rate - proof positive that the GPU is not a problem. Much of the 10 percent variance seems to be down to just two settings: view distance and environmental detail.