Benchmarked - Assassin's Creed: Unity
by Jarred Walton on November 20, 2014 8:30 AM ESTImage Quality and Settings
In retrospect, I probably should have just skipped the Ultra quality setting and opted for some form of custom settings. The texture data just overwhelms most GPUs at Ultra, and even High still struggles in many cases. Even more problematic is that there are only three texturing options: Low, High, and Ultra.
I also want to point you to NVIDIA's Assassin's Creed: Unity Graphics and Performance Guide, because if you're wanting a better look at what some of the graphics options really mean in terms of quality that article has everything you need to know. One item particularly worth noting is that NVIDIA recommends 2GB cards use Low textures, 3GB cards can do High, and Ultra is for 4GB cards (or maybe 6GB/8GB cards).
Anyway, here's a quick look at what the various presets do for quality. Let me start with a table showing what specific settings are applied for each of the presets. Again, the NVIDIA page linked above has a good explanation for what each of the settings does, and more importantly it has image sliders to let you do A/B comparisons for each setting. (Disregard their AA images, though, as it looks like they used 2560x1440 and shrunk them to 1080p – oops.)
| Assassin's Creed: Unity Image Quality Presets | |||||
| Low | Medium | High | Very High | Ultra | |
| Environmental | Low | Medium | High | Very High | Ultra |
| Texture | Low | High | High | Ultra | Ultra |
| Shadow | Low | Low | High | High | Soft (PCSS) |
| Ambient Occlusion | Off | SSAO | SSAO | HBAO+ | HBAO+ |
| Anti-Aliasing | Off | FXAA | 2xMSAA | 2xMSAA | 4xMSAA |
| Bloom | Off | On | On | On | On |
-Low_thumb.jpg)
-Med_thumb.jpg)
-High_thumb.jpg)
-VH_thumb.jpg)
-Ultra_thumb.jpg)
-Low_thumb.jpg)
-Med_thumb.jpg)
-High_thumb.jpg)
-VH_thumb.jpg)
-Ultra_thumb.jpg)
-Low_thumb.jpg)
-Med_thumb.jpg)
-High_thumb.jpg)
-VH_thumb.jpg)
-Ultra_thumb.jpg)
The main things to note is that there's a rather noticeable difference between Low and High texture quality, but not so much from High to Ultra. Environmental quality has a generally minor effect on the appearance of the game, especially at everything above Medium (though there are a few areas that are exceptions to this statement). The difference between Low and High shadows is also quite small, but the Soft Shadows implement PCSS (Percentage Closer Soft Shadows), which do look quite nice while also causing a moderate performance hit.
Anti-aliasing has a ton of settings, but the most useful are generally the MSAA options; those are also the most demanding. FXAA is as usual nearly "free" to enable and can help remove jaggies along with some other image details, which might be the best solution. TXAA performance is pretty similar to 4xMSAA I think, which means it's mostly for high-end rigs. Bloom is pretty much always on except at the lowest setting. Finally, ambient occlusion has two options along with off: SSAO or HBAO+. NVIDIA developed HBAO+ as a better version of AO, and in general I think they're right. It's also supposed to be faster than SSAO, at least on NVIDIA GPUs, so if you have NVIDIA hardware you'll probably want to enable that.
Looking at the presets, the difference between Ultra and Very High is visible in the right areas (e.g. placese with shadows), but they're overall pretty similar. There's a more noticeable drop from Very High to High, mostly with the change in textures, and at least for our test images the Medium and High settings look almost the same.
There are a few last items to note on benchmarking, just by way of reference. First, Assassin's Creed: Unity uses "dynamic" day/night cycles. They're not really dynamic, but Ubisoft has four preset times: morning, noon, dusk, and night. The reason this is important is that benchmarking the same sequence at different times of day can result in quite different results. There's also "dynamic" weather (or at least clouds) that can throw things off. Second, if you change certain image quality settings (which I'll get to next), specifically Texture Quality, you have to restart the game for the changes to take effect. Last, the game has dynamic crowds, which means the runs aren't fully deterministic, but in repeat testing the variance is generally less than 3% and closer to 1%.
The good news is that when you load up the game is always at the morning time slot, so basically you have to exit and reload between every setting change. Yes, it's quite tedious if you're benchmarking a dozen or so GPUs….
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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...