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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
122 Comments
View All Comments
FlushedBubblyJock - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Well only nVidia stock holders since AMD is the pit of hades in the red holing out of everyone's investment pocket.Dribble - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Looks like it's basically cpu limited. Difference between ultra and medium is only a few fps for something like a 970 at 1080p. Would be interesting to try it with a 6 or 8 core intel processor and see how it scales with more cores?JarredWalton - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
On which setup are you seeing "only a few FPS"? 1080p Medium is 22% faster with 970 SLI on average FPS and 31% faster on minimums, and a single 970 is 49% faster average and minimum on Medium vs. Ultra. That's far more than a few FPS.The gap between Medium and High is much smaller, but then they both use High Quality textures and honestly they look very similar. There the performance is only about 10-30% faster (depending on GPU), though minimums still favor cards with 2GB VRAM by a large amount.
Dribble - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Well I'd expect a bigger performance difference between medium and ultra. Looking at the cpu's the 4 core pretty well doubles the 2 cores min frame rates, that shows cpu is having a much bigger impact. If that's the case what would 6 or 8 cores do?JumpingJack - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Hahaha, we have a new king .... "but can it run Assassins Creed Unity"Calista - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
If you have the time I would like you to test further with even lower resolution. It's not much point knowing GPU x can do 18 fps@1080p since it's much easier to adopt to lower resolution as compared to lower frame-rate. Maybe you could use the slowest of the buch and try out 1600x900 and 1280x720 as well? If the system is still up and running I guess it would take much more than a few hours.JarredWalton - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I did run 768p Low on most of the GPUs... I don't want to make a graph because really, desktop users don't want to run games below 1080p IMO. But if you're wondering about the laptops and lower end hardware...Performance at 768p Low (Avg/Min):
860M: 35/25
870M: 45/32
880M: 49/37
980M: 56/40
R7-250X: 25/12
R9-280: 37/24
R9-280X: 43/26
R9-290X: 49/27
Intel HD 4600: 6.6/3.2 (Hahaha...)
Of those, I should note that only the 860M and 250X are unable to hit "playable" frame rates at 900p Medium.
huaxshin - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
CPU plays a big role in Assassin Creed Unity so the GTX 980M comparison against the desktop GPUs are skewed. The desktop GPUs are paired with 84W++ CPUs while the GTX 980M is paired with a 47W soldered lower clocked CPU.I expect the GTX 980M to be closer to GTX 780 if they ran the same clocks. Something that would be interesting to see from Anandtech, a review of GTX 980M against desktop if both had roughly the same CPU power.
http://gamegpu.ru/images/remote/http--www.gamegpu....
JarredWalton - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
The i3-4330 numbers are there for a look at where the CPU bottleneck would lie on lower end CPUs. I would guess that the mobile quad-core CPUs like the i7-4710HQ are generally keeping the GPU "filled" with work. 980M might be a bit faster with a higher clocked CPU, but I don't think it would come anywhere near the 780 or 970.I've got some numbers and basically across a large selection of games the 780 (with a desktop CPU compared to a mobile CPU) is around 25% faster than the 980M (and the 780 and 970 are basically tied in overall rankings -- like literally within 0.1% of each other).
anubis44 - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Jarred, I'd like to see these benchmarks on an AMD FX CPU as well. Forget the APUs, as they don't have level 3 cache, but the FX chips do.