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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WithoutWeakness - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I spent a good 10 seconds admiring the detail they put into every strand of hair on the girl in the first pic before I realized the poor fellow on the right didn't have a face.kron123456789 - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Here's another screenshot with maxed out Ultra graphics))http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/36355106839023...
JarredWalton - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
And as I specifically mentioned in the text: the missing faces/textures was apparently patched on Day 0; I personally never saw the problem. I wonder if all the hubbub over the faceless people might have something to do with a bad crack -- wouldn't that be fun? Anyway, it's 2014 and the game uses UPlay so unless I'm missing something, you have to be connected to the Internet to play and the only people not updating with the patch... well, you fill in the blank.chizow - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Yeah probably, Pirates get half a game and wonder why its broken. Would've been funny if Ubi tweeted something like:"Hey PC players, those of you who are getting scenes from Dark Man pirated the game!" like they did with FC4 POV setting.
r3loaded - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I'm seeing these benchmark results and all I'm thinking of is "shitty optimization".MooseMuffin - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Yup. Poor performance on PC is a good indicator of a rushed PC port, but poor performance on consoles (also true for this game) sounds like the whole project was a mess. Those are fixed hardware configurations that they've known about for a long time.agent_x007 - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
When MSAA/TXAA/MFAA (the latter two are based on former) is dropped -U R good to go on, for example, Ultra settings with 3GB VRAM card up to 1920:1200 (with FXAA).
In this settings I get around 50FPS on GTX 780 Ti OC, here's my video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGdXJN-5YXw
But this game sure can kill any card out there.
kron123456789 - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
This game can kill not only any card, but your mind as well with bugs like thishttp://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/50991716460791...
Lucian2244 - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
That bug was fixed in day one patch and it was only on a few specific GPUs. I know the hate towards Ubi is great but get your facts right.dirtyferret - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I love idiots who think any game under 60FPS is not playable. I imagine they have Fraps running in the corner of their screen and have a total hissy fit if any game dares to dip below 60FPS on their ego trip of a PC. I know Nvidia/AMD stock holders love them dearly.