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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Jon Tseng - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Jared I know you didn't test for it but any thoughts on how system memory affects things? Minimum is for 6GB and 8 GB recommended I wonder what impact this has?(I've just fine from 4GB => 6GB to run this game; wondering if I need to replace the other two sticks two or whether the fact swapfile will be on SSD is enough)
WatcherCK - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I was looking forward to TC: The Division but given Ubisofts recent track history and inherent game factors (new engine, MMO, rpg aspects) im just not sure that it will be anything except a colossal ballsup?Mondozai - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I agree with many other commenters about the strangely sanguine tone of this article, breezing past the massive performance bottlenecks and instead urging people to upgrade their hardware instead of pointing the finger where it belongs - Ubisoft - and attacking them for releasing what is essentially a botched game in terms of performance. You should be running 60+ at high 1080p settings with a 290/780. Instead you barely get to 45 frames with a 780.The fact that even a 980(!) can't get over 60 fps on 1080p high means that the game needs to be canned and not the reader base's hardware. Do better, Jared.
JarredWalton - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
That's certainly not what I'm doing. Just because the last sentence says, "And if this is the shape of things to come, a lot of people might want a GPU upgrade this holiday season" doesn't mean I'm telling everyone to upgrade. What I am saying is that IF you want to run THIS game (and IF other games end up having similar requirements in the near future), then yes, a lot of people will need new hardware (or lower quality settings).When Crysis came out, nothing -- NOTHING -- could run it properly at maximum quality settings. People skewered Crytek and said they were lousy programmers, etc. and "the game doesn't even look that good". And yet, I don't really think that was the case -- they just decided to enable settings that pushed beyond what was currently available.
Is Ubisoft intentionally doing that with their latest releases? Perhaps not in quite the same way (it is the holiday season after all), but the decision to drop support for older generation consoles in order to enable a higher quality experience certainly wasn't made to improve the sales of the game. Believe it or not, there are game developers that just really want to use the latest and greatest technologies, performance be damned.
Fundamentally, we're not a sensationalist website. We're not in the market of pointing fingers, casting blame, etc. All I can say is how the game works right now on the hardware I tested, and it's up to the readers to draw conclusions. Was the game pushed out early? Almost certainly. Should they design all games so that 1080p High gets 60+ FPS? I'm not one to dictate whether that's the best thing to do or not, and I do like seeing companies push the performance envelope on occasion.
It hurts when your high-end GPU can't run a game with settings you are accustomed to using, but I do have to say that their recreation of eighteenth century France is quite remarkable.
mcmilhouse - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
^This. Plus Nvidia 900 series is still 28nm. We haven't had a 20nm card, Apple took all the TSMC production lines.piroroadkill - Saturday, November 22, 2014 - link
Crysis absolutely blew everything else away, graphically.That moment when you're done coming through the first forest and you hit the rays coming through the trees, and you look down over the cliffs.
I don't think many people said it was coded badly (although they probably did), but it was such an incredible step up visually that people really took notice.
Assassin's Creed Unity may also be a fantastic game visually, and I will get it at some point, but the fact is, console hardware is a measly set of Jaguar cores and low to midrange previous generation Radeons.
People are right to expect their massively more powerful machine could run the game at 60 FPS.
Milite777 - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I've just a laptop with i7 2nd gen, 8 gb ram and 6770m (2 gb vram). I know that this conf is too poor for any serious gaming session.. But I'd like to play ACU, like I do with prev episodes... Could I get at least 25 fps with the lowest settings and a resolution of 1366x768? I don't need the best graphics, I just want to know the story... And of course I have to buy this game to try it... Need help guys :)chizow - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Interesting findings Jarred with texture setting, it looks like Santa (Ryan?) sent you some early X-mas presents too with the GPU upgrades. I would also be interested to see a kind of "feature expense" comparison, where you go through some of the main settings to give an idea of what kind of perf hit you take when enabling them at different settings.For example, I remember a time when setting textures to max was an automatic, but now it seems in this age with 2K and now 4K textures with next-gen console ports, that's no longer possible since those textures will fill VRAM in a heartbeat. Also, did you have any >4GB cards or high bandwidth cards to test to see if they helped with the texture situation at all? Like Titan Black?
But lately I have seen textures and MSAA creating a much bigger perf hit than in the past due to the amount of VRAM they take up. There was a time where VRAM didn't make as much of a difference as shading power and you could just crank up the textures and use MSAA without the crazy hits to perf we see today.
iceveiled - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I opted to turn everything up to max on my 970 (but with soft shadows turned off) and with a 30 fps locked frame rate (1080p). It plays butter smooth, but man, if any game benefits from that 60 fps frame rate it's assassin's creed, with it's wonky input lag (I play it with a controller) and even wonkier world traversal / parkour.Takes a bit of getting used to, but at 30 fps it ain't all that bad and it's a damn nice looking game with the settings maxed out.
D. Lister - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
Ubisoft is just forming a pattern here of poorly optimised software. They have some of the best artists, but apparently some of the worst software developers. Also, I don't believe them for a second when they try to offload their incompetence on a hardware manufacturer.