Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight Appears Like a PC Gaming Nightmare

Ever since Nvidia revealed body era with the RTX 4080, I’ve been dreading the day {that a} sport developer makes use of it as a requirement to get to a suitable body charge. And whereas we’ve gone virtually 4 years with out that occuring, it looks like Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight goes to cross that line.

This previous weekend, developer TT Games launched the system necessities for the brand new Lego Batman sport, and whereas at first look they appear sort of affordable for a Unreal Engine 5-based sport, a more in-depth look reveals that the corporate desires you to activate body era simply to hit 30 fps with the minimal settings. That’s probably not how body era ought to work.

If this isn’t simply an error, it means that the minimal spec will solely actually have the ability to get 15-20 fps with out body era, and at that time, no quantity of AI frames goes to reserve it from being an unplayable mess.

What is Frame Generation For?

For the uninitiated, it’s straightforward to take a look at body era and simply assume it’s a magical increase to your body charge. But to grasp why it’s a foul factor to lean on body gen with the intention to hit 30 fps, it’s necessary to understand how this know-how truly works.

Essentially, body era makes use of a machine studying mannequin to generate frames primarily based on a rendered body and movement vector information taken from the sport engine. While this body is being generated by your GPU, the precise rendered body is held again for a tiny bit, after which each the unique body and the generated frames are then paced out by both your CPU or your GPU.

By its very nature, this course of introduces latency, or enter lag. At the next body charge, the added latency is barely noticeable, if in any respect, however there’s a cause that even AMD and Nvidia suggest that this characteristic is simply turned on if you happen to’re already getting a good body charge – sometimes no less than 30 fps, however ideally 60 fps or above. At a decrease body charge, just like the 15 fps prompt by these Lego Batman necessities, you’re already getting extraordinarily excessive latency, and body era will solely make it worse, even when it “looks” extra clean.

Not to say, at decrease body charges, there isn’t sufficient information generated by the rendered frames and the movement information to precisely generate an additional body. That means, the decrease your body charge is whenever you allow body gen, the extra seemingly you’re going to run into artifacts and different visible glitches.

It’s too early to know whether or not or not Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight will truly run at such a low body charge with out body era. But if it does, taking part in this sport goes to be an terrible expertise until you could have a strong sufficient gaming PC to brute drive good efficiency out of it.

Frame Gen with Old Hardware

What makes issues even weirder is that TT Games requires no less than an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 to run Legacy of the Dark Knight, which might be a reasonably modest spec by itself. But, even with this now-ancient graphics card, it’s nonetheless recommending body era – however DLSS body gen doesn’t even work on this outdated of a GPU.

Instead, for these older GPUs, TT Games is counting on FSR or XeSS body era, which nonetheless works a lot in the identical means as Nvidia’s tech, however as a result of it’s not accelerated by specialised cores within the GPU, it’s slower and never as correct. That simply makes a foul efficiency state of affairs even worse.

Crimson Desert was one other sport that relied on FSR body era to spice up efficiency on handhelds just like the Steam Deck or Xbox Ally X, for example, however that sport relied on this know-how to achieve 60 fps, not 30 fps.

TT Games doesn’t even point out handhelds within the system necessities for Legacy of the Dark Knight, so it’s fairly protected to imagine this sport isn’t going to run properly on moveable techniques. And that’s a disgrace, as a result of it’s the kind of sport that’d be superior to drag out on the prepare or on a protracted flight throughout the nation.

A Bad Port in a Sea of Good Ports

What’s significantly wild about Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight having such ridiculous PC necessities is that the very best PC video games thus far this yr have been extraordinarily properly optimized. Crimson Desert, Resident Evil: Requiem and Pragmata have all run like a dream, and whereas none of those video games are operating on Unreal 5, they do make the most recent Lego sport stand out a bit extra.

What makes it worse is that these Lego video games are designed for teenagers, and whereas there’s positive to be some on the market whose dad and mom have costly rigs, it’s fully attainable that these inflated system necessities are going to put the sport out of attain for a lot of.

Just primarily based on the previews we’ve seen thus far, Legacy of the Dark Knight does look very good. It’s making good use of what seems to be ray traced international illumination and reflections, and the material textures on the detective’s cape look wonderful. But if all of that comes at the price of a playable body charge, it’s simply not well worth the commerce off – no less than not on PC.

If TT Games’ system necessities are correct, most individuals shall be higher off taking part in this sport on consoles the place, no less than for now, body era isn’t a factor. Although, it does appear to be the PlayStation 6 and Xbox Project Helix will assist the know-how, so I’m positive this isn’t the final time we’re going to see builders attempt to pigeon-hole body era right into a sport that doesn’t run properly within the first place. I hope I’m fallacious.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC parts queen. You can comply with her @Jackiecobra