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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JarredWalton - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I'll bet you a dollar you're CPU limited at mid to high 70s when you're down on the streets. Anyway, I ran the Medium numbers as well at 1080p, which is basically FXAA with High textures and a few other items turned down a notch that don't really affect things that much. As to what's "an accurate representation of the kind of performance you can get", well, the numbers don't lie. If you want to run different settings, the numbers change, but there's a reason the developers don't just use FXAA as the default at all settings.Carfax - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I probably am CPU limited with V-sync off, but considering I'm above 60 FPS and how much is being rendered (the game is absolutely massive in scope and detail), I would say that the engine is still fairly optimized. When I'm playing the game, my CPU is usually around 50 to 60% loaded on all 12 threads with V-sync on. I haven't tested CPU usage with V-sync off though.The game definitely uses a hex core processor, so that's probably why your frame rates are lower than mine..
mcmilhouse - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I wonder if Apple didn' take all the 20nm production this year, and amd/nvidia had 20nm cards, if we wouldnt have a $200-300 card that outputs 60fps easy at 1080p ultra. We really should of been at 20nm this year.Crazyeyeskillah - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Why don't u turn off AA and show people what the game can actually run at. I don't know why this is a must have when you can't get solid frame rates. If you ran all the same benches without any AA i don't see why it would be so abysmal. AA is a luxury not mandatory.JarredWalton - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
You mean like the 1080p Medium graph? That uses FXAA, which is nearly "free" to enable.Crazyeyeskillah - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
No, more on some of the high end numbers where aa starts to get redundant, especially at 4k. I loved crysis when it came out and it slapped my 7900gtx sli around because I knew it was the start of something great to come. This game does have some nice touches, especially in the quantity of npc's on the screen, use of ai and level of detail for such an expansive city, but is nowhere close to heralding in a new concept look of what's to come in terms of textures and reach. Most people are gonna set it to highest textures, turn off AA and get their playable fps at whatever resolution their card supports so I have to admit this is the first time i've really felt a little leary at the state of the game presented on ANANDTECH. I've been reading the site since it was launched but this game benchmark just didn't make me come off with a sense of what performance is really going to be like across various setups.FITCamaro - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I don't understand how they can do a poorer job of porting the game to PC on AMD hardware than Nvidia when the consoles are using AMD GPUs. Unless they built it for PC with Nvidia in mind and then did a crappy job of porting it to consoles. Of course given the poor performance of the game on consoles, that isn't hard to believe.Ubisoft is quickly becoming the new EA. I won't be buying this game this year. Probably in a year when it's down to $20 and they've maybe patched it to a reasonable state. I say maybe because Watch Dogs has been out for months and is still pretty bad.
FlushedBubblyJock - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
The bleeding edge has to be pushed, lest there be no need for more.Same thing was said about Crysis, then it wound up being the most famous FPS freak game ever, and still is, until perhaps now.
So getting down on the leading edge games that present a challenge to GPU designers is not in all of our best interest.
Also it's nice to see a "port" frustrate the highest end elite desktops and see the whining not be about how cruddy for any sort of gaming ported games are, but in this case how " slow my thousands of dollars are ".
Very glad too see it crushing the best of the best, we need more of this at a faster rate, then we hopefully won't hear so much about and so often " the increase with the new core isn't worth it ".
Now the GPU makers must overcome, a challenge is a good thing.
Horza - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
This would be a reasonable sentiment if in fact the game was "bleeding edge" graphically. Crysis was a landmark visually (and still looks impressive) and I feel very safe to wager that Unity will not be remembered in even close to the same way. Anyone can make a game that brings "elite" hardware to it's knees, it's not an impressive feat on it's own if it doesn't deliver the experience to justify it.Daggard - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
*shrug* runs fine on my PS4. I'd give it more of an 8.5 personally. Paris is the best playground yet for this series. Online features are still being ironed out, but the game is great :)