Warner Bros. Games and TT Games have confirmed that LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight will be Steam Deck certified when it launches next week on 22nd May, but this actually raises more questions, given the minimum PC requirements that were released recently.
Being Steam Deck certified is great news, and bodes well for the Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game, which will be launching some time after the PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC release.
However, the minimum PC requirements for this new Lego Batman have caused quite the stink on social media, not for the actual hardware specs, but for the performance that it supposedly offers. With an Intel Core i5-10600K or AMD Ryzen 5 1600, 16GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960, AMD Radeon RX 6400, or Intel Arc A580 GPU, the performance target is for 1080p at 30fps…. but apparently only with both FSR upscaling and even frame generation enabled.
Frame generation is only recommended for use when you already have a good, stable, high frame rate, because while it can smooth out the perceived frame rate, it is not actually improving the underlying performance and responsiveness of the game. In fact, it actually adds latency, and requires specific anti-lag techniques to be used as well. So having frame gen be required to hit 30fps means you’ll actually be playing a game that feels like it’s playing at 15fps.
The Steam Deck would, of course, only be targeting 1280×800 for its internal screen, but the GPU in the handheld PC is significantly less powerful than the Radeon RX 6400. Both are from the same RDNA 2 generation, but the Steam Deck has 8 compute units to the 6400’s 12, it has half to two thirds the clock speed, it has half the memory bandwidth.
All of which is to say that the PC specs for LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight make next to no sense, especially if the game is now Steam Deck certified. Hopefully TT Games can come back and revise the PC requirements again to reflect the true core performance (without frame gen) that can be expected.
Putting the technicalities to one side, we’re really looking forward to Legacy of the Dark Knight. I got to go hands on with a couple hours of the game and had a blast. “I loved every moment of my hands-on time with Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight,” I wrote. “Even if Batman’s origin has been told and reimagined countless times in the past, a fresh Lego-tastic take is very welcome, and all of the humour, the delightful animation, and the callbacks and references really worked for me.”
Source: Steam
