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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kcn4000 - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
absolutely this! I don't have to buy new hardware to accommodate lazy porting/coding. Don't buy this game until it is in an acceptable state.JarredWalton - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Isn't that what I said in the conclusion as well? "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."If you have a 780 or above, the game runs fine -- just not with Ultra textures. Go for 1080p High and don't worry about it. (You might be able to reach for 1440p High, but honestly it's going to be tough on any single GPU to run that setting as it's almost twice as many pixels to render at 1080p.) If you have AMD, yeah, either the game needs some patching or AMD's drivers need tweaking -- or both.
anubis44 - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Hear hear. Ubisoft's motto needs to become: "We shall sell no wine before its time."I have a sneaking suspicion that nVidia's money is behind lack of AMD optimization. Ubisoft MUST make the game work on the AMD-powered consoles, so I hardly believe they didn't know how to make it work with Radeon graphics cards on the PC side. More like nVidia paid them off not to use Mantle and make it work well with AMD cards.
FlushedBubblyJock - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
More like it's cutting edge stuff that brings the best to it's knees, so nVidia has to spend their millions since AMD is broken and broke and helpless, so AMD whines and moans and PR lies, then many moons later a few of us find out AMD refused to cooperate because they act like their most childish fans instead of professionally and in their own best interest.RussianSensation - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Flushed, your posts make absolutely no sense when AMD's GCN cards run very well in modern games such as COD:AW, Civilization BE, Evil Within, Ryse: Son of Rome, Dragon Age Inquisition, and especially in another Ubisoft title: FC4.RussianSensation - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
R9 290X = 56 fps980 = 57 fps
7970Ghz/280X = 42 fps
770 = 29 fps
techspot . com/review/917-far-cry-4-benchmarks/page4.html
Besides Unity and some issues in Lords of the Fallen, it is actually NV cards, specifically Kepler architecture, that has not been pulling its weight in the last 6 months. Not to mention that AMD has the entire sub-$330 desktop GPU market locked up, winning in performance at every price level.
techspot . com/guides/912-best-graphics-cards-2014/page7.html
Focusing on the broken Unity game as evidence that AMD has issues in performance misses the other 95% of games released in the last 6 months where it is NV that's having issues. Good one.
Horza - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Pesky facts won't help, this is an emotional argument. AMD are childish, whining liars don't you know.JarredWalton - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Have you looked at what people are saying about the console versions, though? They're not exactly shining pillars of smooth frame rates. And I seriously doubt NVIDIA paid Ubisoft to not optimize for anything other than NVIDIA hardware; it's more likely a case of "AMD didn't come by and offer us free GPUs and software developer support."It's in Ubisoft's best interest to make the best game they can that will run on the widest selection of hardware possible. Many of these games have budgets in the tens of millions, so intentionally killing performance (and sales) on a big chunk of the market would be crazy. Then again, the world is full of crazy.... :-)
chizow - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Yes Anubis, of course you have a sneaking suspicion, Nvidia obviously paid AMD's driver team to write bad drivers and not bother optimizing for AC: Unity to show Ubisoft how much bad publicity they could garner for not teaming up with a vendor that is becoming less relevant by the day.I guess you could say the difference is, the consoles makers actually write their own drivers for their APUs and AMD has nothing to do with it at this point. They gave them the keys and blueprints and vacated the premises, which is probably a good thing for console owners. If you bought a console would you honestly want to rely on AMD driver updates for it? D:
AMD needs a driver update, plain and simple. The poor XFire scaling results should be enough to make this clear, which I know you are already aware of.
kron123456789 - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Btw, about image quality...I suggest you to take a look at these screenshots. This is amazing graphics!http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/53625466562634...
http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/34103307051801...
http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/34103307025487...