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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RafaelHerschel - Monday, November 24, 2014 - link
I don’t mind somebody saying: “this game is perfectly playable for me at 40 fps”. I do mind it if people say that there is no perceivable difference between 40 fps and 60 fps (as stated in the comments) or when people say “the game runs smooth as butter” when it doesn't. The article was fair, some of the comments weren't.For me a game is not enjoyable at anything below 50 fps and I much prefer it to have Vsync enabled.
I would say that most people accept 60 fps as a reasonable goal at medium settings (whatever they may be) with a high-end GPU. Depending on personal taste (graphics settings) and budget people can than choose to sacrifice fps for MSAA, AO, high-res textures and/or money.
I strongly believe that studios should aim for 60 fps at medium settings with a high-end card and 60 fps with a medium-card at low settings (both at 1080).
With smart design choices and quality control that is certainly possible. As it stands, I’m disappointed with both Far Cry 4 and Unity.
HisDivineOrder - Monday, November 24, 2014 - link
1) Wonder if an i5 vs i7 (hyperthreading) matters.2) Wonder why you guys don't borrow a Titan Black and test it to see if the extra VRAM improves things. Surely, a contact at Asus, Gigabyte, nVidia, etc has a Titan Black with 6GB of RAM to lend you. Probably two for SLI. I'm curious to see if the game can use the VRAM because I'm hearing reports of Ultra taking 4GB and gobbling it up.
3) Ultra settings preset includes MSAA. That's the first setting I'd turn off if my settings were taking a dive. It gobbles up memory AND processing like nobody's business. What happens if you turn it off?
Seems like obvious questions to me. Until Batman Arkham Knight, this looks to be The Benchmark game in terms of crushing your system. Assuming they ever finish patching it.
RafaelHerschel - Monday, November 24, 2014 - link
If the available VRAM makes a difference, then lowering texture quality and turning of all forms of AA will make a big difference.Unfortunately Ubisoft games don't scale well with lowering the settings.
Evenload - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
VRAM clearly makes a very big difference on this game. To answer the question above I maxed out the settings at 1080p on my GTX Titan (original) and just ran/jumped round Paris a bit while GPU-Z was set to data log. The file shows constantly high memory usage maxing out at about 4.4Gb. Interestingly with stock settings the GPU was often being pushed to relatively high clock rates by GPU boost so it looks like the GPU was not being worked extremely hard.Not a scientific test but potentially bad news for people with 2Gb and 3Gb cards as tweaking will not recover the difference. Interestingly I noticed that the main system memory the game takes is not that large and I wander if the issues people are experiencing are possibly related to the way the game has been programmed and the unified memory model PS and Xbox use. On the consoles the distinction between "graphics" memory and "system" memory would not matter in the same way that they do in a gaming PC with a graphics card.
joeh4384 - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
Lol at needing freaking SLI 970s for 60+ fps at 1080p. Do you think patches in time can make this playable for high end single card setups like a 290x on ultra.Lerianis - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
Unity is a good game once you get past the glitchfest. No, it is not a revolution of the Assassin's Creed series, more an evolution of Assassin's Creed 4. It is one awesome game (I played it on a friend's console and another one's PC) once you get past those issues.The only thing I don't like about it is that it is VERY VERY hungry for graphics power even at 1080p settings.
To the point where the latest 980M's from NVidia struggle to push more than 30fps at those settings on Ultra.
I'm wondering (considering I do not see much additional graphics prettiness) whether that is a sign that the game was not properly optimized for PC's and notebook PC's. If it is, that is something that Ubisoft (and other game makers) are going to have to take note of and fix.
Ramon Zarat - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
I'll only say this: Fuck Ubisoft, the new E.A.IUU - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
At last a breath of fresh air. Instead of getting everyone excited of how good you can play pacman at 10k, one company still serves as a reminder of the distance we still have to cross.Way to go Ubisoft, and if you make a game hardly playable at 1280X720, I will make a donation to you and create a church for you. We have had enough from the mobile devolution, touting meaningless resolutions(3 mega pixels on a tablet, oh my god). You will serve as a reminder that high resolution is good, but you have to have some real content to show on it.
We need a new Crysis, rather not only one but several in succession.
wrayj - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
I've seen videos where dropping the resolution to 1600x900 is really the way to claw back performance.is4u2p - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
I got way better than this with my i5-3570k and R9-290.