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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funnyferrell - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Unless I'm totally blind, your CPU benchmarks don't appear to be up there.JarredWalton - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
As noted in the text, I only ran the i3-4330 simulation with one GPU, and furthermore I only ran it at 1080p (Ultra/High/Medium). Basically it couldn't do more than that so I left of further testing.FITCamaro - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Yes but you mention charts and don't show any.JarredWalton - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
The i3-4330 + GTX 980 numbers are in black in the 1080p charts.P39Airacobra - Tuesday, January 13, 2015 - link
How was a i3 doing so bad? This game is basically the same engine as black flag except not optimized at all. And the i3 always performs almost identical in games vs the i5 and i7. Are you sure you did not fake that?P39Airacobra - Tuesday, January 13, 2015 - link
Also I know of some Pentiums like the G3258 model playing the game perfect with a 970.P39Airacobra - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
I suppose you are because the benchmarks are there, You just have to know how to use a webpage instead of only worrying about trends.os6B8dbVUesnzqF - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I'm not sure why any of these frame rates are considered playable. Unless you have a gsync monitor, anything less than 60fps minimum frame rate is going to be awful.JarredWalton - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
"Playable" is not the same as "ideal". I've logged plenty of hours over the years playing games at well under 60 FPS. 30FPS is usually the point where things get "smooth enough" to play well. 40+ is definitely sufficient. G-SYNC is merely icing on the cake if you have it.raghu78 - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
JaredTesting must be done at settings which are playable. Why are you testing QHD with Ultra and 4k with High settings where not even a GTX 980 is playable ? You did not even bother to show what setting is playable at 1440p/4k on GTX 980. My guess is high at 1440p and medium or low at 4k would have been playable on GTX 980. Gameworks features like PCSS is killing fps on all cards. AMD definitely need to improve performance in AC Unity.