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
JarredWalton - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
If I had an FX rig, you can be sure I'd test at least one or two GPUs on it to see how it compares, but sadly I don't.chizow - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I thought that was what the i3 simulation was meant to mimic? ;)Morawka - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
we need those big wide nvidia cards to come back. 512bit bus or even a 1024bit bus. My GTX 980 only chokes when i try to enable any form of AA on FC4 and AC: Unity. As long as AA is set to None or 2x MSAA, the games fun at 60FPS.Notmyusualid - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Great to see some mobile GPU numbers in there.Allows the rest of us to know what to expect from a title...
Thanks.
eanazag - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
The game is a hardware thrasher from the numbers. I can understand seeing PC titles playing with low frame rates, but there's a problem if the consoles can't get the game over 30 FPS. That is a design failure since you can't upgrade consoles.YazX_ - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
PCSS kills performance, im running the game everything on Ultra except PCSS is set to High with FXAA at WQHD (2560 x 1440) and getting 55 FPS avg with 970 GTX (1525/8Ghz), min FPS is like 40.switching to 2xMSAA with MFAA enabled gets me around 45 FPS avg and 30 Min, so i wonder how 970 SLI in your benches couldnt sustain 60 FPS on WQHD?!
JarredWalton - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Ultra is 4xMSAA with PCSS. You had a 10FPS drop just enabling 2xMSAA, and 4xMSAA would take another 10 or so FPS off, with PCSS accounting for an additional 10 (give or take).Carfax - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
The main reason for the low performance is the use of MSAA. MSAA in this engine has a massive performance hit as the engine uses deferred rendering . Running the game on ultra settings with FXAA instead of MSAA would net you over 10 FPS easily.JarredWalton - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Umm... MSAA on many games tends to exact a fairly decent performance hit, and the more complex the game the bigger the hit. FXAA is basically a 3% hit (vs. no AA) by comparison so yes it would be much faster.Carfax - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Exactly, so posting benchmarks of the game running at MSAA 4x isn't exactly an accurate representative of the kind of performance you can get out of the game, and arguably isn't even worth the massive performance hit as it just gives you a very slight IQ boost over FXAA. On my own machine, I'm playing at 1440p maxed settings with FXAA and I'm seeing 60 FPS on a regular basis with V-sync on. With V-sync off, I'm getting into the 70s..This is on a Gigabyte G1 GTX 970 SLI rig with a 4930K @ 4.3ghz driving them..