Batman: Arkham Knight returned to Steam last month, following a lengthy absence caused by its disastrously poor PC port. But even though it was "fixed," it still wasn't where it should have been: Warner copped to some lingering technical problems in the re-release announcement, and said it was "still working with our GPU partners to add full support for SLI and Crossfire." Today, however, it said that plans to support multiple GPUs have been scrapped.
"We’ve been working with our development and graphics driver partners over the last few months to investigate utilizing multi-GPU support within Batman: Arkham Knight. The result was that even the best case estimates for performance improvements turned out to be relatively small given the high risk of creating new issues for all players," Warner rep "wb.elder.pliny" wrote on Steam. "As a result we’ve had to make the difficult decision to stop work on further multi-GPU support. We are disappointed that this was not practical and apologize to those who have been waiting for this feature."
This isn't necessarily a devastating letdown. SLI and Crossfire support is hit-or-mess and sometimes wonky, and performance boosts are often relatively marginal. (As Wes said in our graphics card roundup, "We'll always advocate the best single-GPU solution for gaming when possible.") But Warner said a month ago that multiple-GPU support was in the works, and as far as I know never hinted that it wouldn't be able to make it happen. More to the point, it should be able to make it happen, and the fact that the payoff isn't worth the effort is something that should have come to light long before the game was released, not long after.
Then again, if Warner did the things it was supposed to do before it shoved Arkham Knight out the door, it wouldn't have had to halt sales for five months, apologize, make excuses, and then offer refunds to any Steam owner who'd laid hands on the thing. Which, by the way, is an offer you can take advantage of right up to the end of 2015—just in case you were wondering.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.
