Benchmarked - Assassin's Creed: Unity
by Jarred Walton on November 20, 2014 8:30 AM ESTClosing Thoughts
There are two things you can count on with the fall gaming season: lots of games, and occasionally botched launches as publishers rush to release new titles in time for the peak of the holiday shopping spree. Ubisoft has three major games launching right now, Assassin's Creed: Unity came out last week, Far Cry 4 just released Tuesday, and The Crew launches next week. Obviously, they don't want to launch all three on the same day, but more than one person has come to the conclusion that ACU should have been delayed by a few weeks to get all the bugs worked out.
So far, there has been a Day 0 patch, then the current 1.2, and at least two more patches are planned I believe. The next should provide further bug fixes (and performance optimizations perhaps), while a later patch will also add tessellation support to the game. It's probably a good idea to get performance "fixed" as much as possible before adding tessellation, as it could simply reduce already low frame rates on a lot of systems.
My own experience with Assassin's Creed: Unity has thankfully been mostly uneventful. There was talk about missing textures and "faceless" people, but that's apparently only on unpatched versions – the Day 0 patch addressed that bug, and I know at least in my case I never saw it. Stability hasn't been perfect, but the second patch did a lot to address any crashes in my case – I've played for a few hours several times without crashing, though after a while it seems crashes are still possible.
By far the biggest concern however is performance. I'd say if you can average about 40FPS (with minimums in the mid-20s or above), Assassin's Creed: Unity is playable. The problem is that to get such frame rates, you basically need to go with Low settings on quite a few "midrange" GPUs, and even beefy GPUs like the GTX 980 aren't going to be happy with all settings maxed out at resolutions beyond 1080p. If you have the hardware, ACU is a great looking game and a good addition to the Assassin's Creed series. But for those running older GPUs – or AMD GPUs – you probably want to wait at least another month to see what happens before buying the game.
And if this is the shape of things to come, a lot of people might want a GPU upgrade this holiday season.
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silverblue - Saturday, November 22, 2014 - link
Understood - definite incompetence and on a grand scale, too, considering somebody with multiple cards has put x times the money into the vendor than somebody who would purchase just the one. I would find it hard to believe that they were unaware from their own internal testing. There's the possibility that whoever presides over this was given their marching orders and AMD set about fixing the damage, but I guess we'll never know.I apologise for the pedantry as well.
D. Lister - Saturday, November 22, 2014 - link
No problem at all, it takes a big man to take an opposing argument with such candor - well done.FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
It's AMD's responsibility to work with game devs to make certain their cards work properly.Of course, AMD is notoriou for not doing that for many, many years, then of course, it's nVidia's fault.
AMD might do well: " We take full responsibility."
That would mean of course having Catalyst Makers doing more than emailing and whining, like showing up at game dev studios and taking an active hand and having game day drivers ready.
Of course if they did that, what would their unbelievably as incompetent misplaced blame fans have to do ?
I mean seriously, it's as bad as the worst politicians we've ever seen pointing fingers in every direction but their own.
Lerianis - Friday, November 28, 2014 - link
Agreed.... should be year and a half at least for a game of this scale with the manpower allotted to Ubisoft Montreal.JarredWalton - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
1440p High is probably playable on a single GTX 980 -- I just ran GTX 970 on that and got results of 30.4/23.6 Avg/Min, which is about 40% faster (44% to be precise) on average FPS and 65% faster on minimum FPS. If 980 sees the same scaling, it will be around 35/26 FPS at 1440p High. There's not a huge difference in performance or quality between the High and Medium presets, which means you really would need to drop to Low (or close to it) for 4K gaming.Why did I test these settings? Because you have to choose something, and we generally go with "Ultra" at 1440p -- just to see how the GPUs fare. I've tested 4K at Ultra in the past, but that was completely unplayable across the board so I dropped to High for this game. If I had dropped 1440p to High, I'm sure I'd get people wanting to see Ultra numbers -- you can't please everyone.
Anyway, as someone that has a 4K display, I can tell you I'd rather play at 1440p or even 1080p with better graphics quality (High, Very High, or Ultra) than run at native 4K with the Low/Medium settings. YMMV.
AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, November 22, 2014 - link
IMHO, as a 30" owner I'm more interested in 2560-benchmarks at a quality setting that gives 60fps on non-SLI cards.Akrovah - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I disagree. I find 30 perfectly playable. That's the effective frame rate of television. Movies are 24, and nobody has issues with them not being "smooth enough." Heck, people almsot got out pitch forks when someone dared film a movie at 48 fps.I mean yes, for gamign 60 fps is preferable and looks and feels better, but to call anythign under that "awful" is going a little far. Especially whent he game in question is not a twitch shooter. Action/adventure games like Assassin's Creed are perfectly enjoyable at 30 fps.
HanzNFranzen - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Well you know, this is the internet... comments must be exaggerated for effect. Either something is greatest of all time or it's awful, never any middle ground. Anyways, I have a GTX980 and a 5820k @ 4.0Ghz and I would say that my experience with "playability" in this game doesn't really mirror the benchmarks at 2560x1440/ultra. Perhaps there are more taxing areas on the game that I haven't seen yet but I'm not seeing frames dropping into the teens. I feel the controls hurt the playability of the game more than anything as they just seem clucky.theMillen - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
Exactly my remarks, 3770k @ 4.8, and evga 980 acx oc'd to 1550... and at 1440/ultra it is completely playable, im about 4 hours in and am completely satisfied with results. would i love to stay above 60fps at all times? yes. am i satisfied? yup!foxtrot1_1 - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
There is a big difference between passively watching a 24fps film and interacting with a 24fps video game. I'm far from a pedant on these things and I find anything under 45-50 fps distractingly unplayable.