Nvidia's Tom Peterson says his best and brightest colleagues are working with Warner Bros. to fix the PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight. The final game in Rocksteady's trilogy, Arkham Knight was released on PC in bad shape and eventually pulled off of Steam. But making an appearance on MMORPG.com yesterday, Peterson says he has top men working on the solution.
"We're fixing a ton of things that are not necessarily related to us," Peterson said. "Some of it may be related to our driver, some not. But at the end of the day the game is the focus and we're going to make it great."
Peterson is a distinguished engineer at Nvidia (that's his actual title) and part of the Gameworks group. Gameworks is a service that Nvidia offers, and an upper tier of support within the graphics card manufacturer that works to provide tested solutions for bleeding edge game effects.
"We have 200 to 300 engineers that are really visual scientists," Peterson said. "They're the best out there. Artists, Ph.D.s. ... We've taken the approach that says let's capture what they've got in their minds, convert it to algorithms ... test it and QA it, and then provide it as middleware effectively to game developers."
The work they're doing on Arkham Knight after the fact is, to hear Peterson tell it, more of a goodwill gesture to the PC gaming community.
"I look at [Arkham Knight] as an example of where Nvidia can help a developer get to market with a quality game," Peterson said. "Warner Bros. ... made a few mistakes getting the game out. It wasn't fully performance optimized for PC. So now we're deploying our QA resources and our engineers to make that game as good as it possibly can be."
When the game initially came out, one solution to make the it run better on PC was to essentially turn off every single advanced digital effect, basically making all the bells and whistles baked into your graphics card — and Nvidia's carefully wrought code — useless. Working together, Peterson says Nvidia and Warner Bros. can do better for players.
"I gotta tell you on the releases I've seen it is a fantastic game," he said. "It plays great, it's tons of fun and the effects are amazing. And I can tell you that when Warner Bros. makes it available on Steam again that people are going to be delight."
You can watch the entire interview, which is embedded above. When Arkham Knight was released on PlayStation 4, Polygon gave it a rare score of 10. The game is also available on Xbox One. The next patch for the PC version is expected in August.
