HardOCP: Assassin's Creed Unity Performance Video Card Review

[Keysplayr]

Ubisoft surely has some work ahead of them.
Borderlands titles seem fine. Technical disasters is probably exaggerating things a bit though when applied in a sweeping generalization, with the exception of AC:Unity.

 

[raghu78]

Ubisoft surely has some work ahead of them.
Borderlands titles seem fine. Technical disasters is probably exaggerating things a bit though when applied in a sweeping generalization, with the exception of AC:Unity.

Watchdogs, AC Unity and Farcry 4 complete a trio of unoptimized and buggy games. Ubisoft is the worst publisher in the industry today. If you want to spend your money on the trash that they sell go ahead. But there are others who will not spend even a dime. hardocp only reiterated what other reviewers said. heck even the user score on metacritic is a miserable 2.4.

The latest patch for Watchdogs broke SLI support at 4k. 6 months later this game still does not provide the best possible gaming experience on Nvidia cards. the irony is its a Nvidia TWIMTBP and Gameworks title.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2014...gtx_980_sli_4k_video_card_review/5#.VJ2cWeAAA

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2014...x_980_sli_overclocked_gpu_review/4#.VJ2cMeAAA

 

[Keysplayr]

Yeah, that's pretty bad news.

 

[Carfax83]

The latest patch for Watchdogs broke SLI support at 4k. 6 months later this game still does not provide the best possible gaming experience on Nvidia cards. the irony is its a Nvidia TWIMTBP and Gameworks title.

I'm very annoyed that Watch Dogs is still broken for SLI users, but I don't know if it's Ubisoft's or NVidia's fault.

Like BFG10K said, multiGPU isn't a part of the DX11 spec and while developers can implement support for it in their engines, it's really up to the IHVs to make it work properly by releasing drivers and SLI/Crossfire profiles.

As far as I know, Crossfire works just fine in Watch Dogs, but SLI doesn't. And SLI works just fine in AC Unity (despite the flickering issue), but AMD has not released any Crossfire profiles.

 

[boozzer]

So far all the major Gameworks titles have been technical disasters to one degree or another. AC: Unity being the most outright broken and Watch Dogs a close second. FC4 still has issues with the gameworks PCSS shadows being too dark and there is a related SLI ghosting issue in conjunction with SMAA, but it is pretty decent apart from that and performs well unlike the other messes.

Witcher 3 is going to have to deliver on good optimization, no broken graphical features, functional multi-gpu performance and the rest. It's the next title with heavy use of gameworks and should help to highlight if it is gameworks that is broken or ubisoft using gameworks

At this point AC unity is a write off. Outdoor scenes look like the UE3 engine to me, horrible textures and NPCs look like they are coming off the Xbox 360. Four patches later and the game is still broken. It's another Watch Dogs, a game that will forever be broken. [H] nailed it when they suggested the game is suitable for a full recall, refund of money to customers and re-release once the game is not in an alpha state.

bro, why you gotta crash in on carfax's dream? why? let the little guy dream!

 

[Erenhardt]

I dunno if Carfax tries to show how bad this game looks or what....

Srsly... on every single screenshot there is always something that looks 2012...

 

[AtenRa]

Just a few pics from RYSE at 1080p with my HD7950 @ 1GHz (Core i7 3770K @ 4.44GHz).

Highest settings, Blur Off and Super Sampling 1.5x. Havent seen FPS below 30.

 

[Carfax83]

bro, why you gotta crash in on carfax's dream? why? let the little guy dream!

I dunno if Carfax tries to show how bad this game looks or what....

Srsly... on every single screenshot there is always something that looks 2012...

Haters gonna hate and ballers gonna ball.

 

[tential]

Can you provide a screenshot or two Carfax with the resolution at 1080p? If you can use DSR even better.

I am viewing the screenshots but I see a ton of jagged edges but I'm on a 1080p screen so I'm zoomed in.

My guess is that many users are viewing it on 1080p screens (or just lower resolution screen than you have) and thus are exaggerating the jagged edges. However, we can all see a 1080p screenshot and using DSR/VSR to get your native resolution(Or just playable settings don't care how high you DSR as long as we get an idea of the FPS you're getting from the FRAPs counter) down to something everyone can view probably shows the game how it should be and not exaggerating jagged edges.

Edit: Also, to the thread in general, if you're going to post screenshots from OTHER GAMES at least give a reason/description as to why you're posting them rather than just tossing them in the thread....

Watchdogs, AC Unity and Farcry 4 complete a trio of unoptimized and buggy games. Ubisoft is the worst publisher in the industry today. If you want to spend your money on the trash that they sell go ahead. But there are others who will not spend even a dime. hardocp only reiterated what other reviewers said. heck even the user score on metacritic is a miserable 2.4.

The latest patch for Watchdogs broke SLI support at 4k. 6 months later this game still does not provide the best possible gaming experience on Nvidia cards. the irony is its a Nvidia TWIMTBP and Gameworks title.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2014...gtx_980_sli_4k_video_card_review/5#.VJ2cWeAAA

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2014...x_980_sli_overclocked_gpu_review/4#.VJ2cMeAAA

It's unacceptable to have a sponsored title and your SLI not work on it. I don't care who's fault it is.
If I'm Nvidia though, I'd part ways with Ubisoft. They've had so many fails that I start to think Gameworks is a failure. If Keysplayr hadn't mentioned Borderlands used Gameworks I would have completely forgotten since that game works.

 

[Vesku]

Don't think the RYSE screenshots are comparable at least in terms of crowds. I actually applaud the AC Unity devs for trying to create the real people clutter of a living city. Barring some other developer creating giant interactive crowds with decent levels of detail I think the GPU technology just isn't quite there yet. Seems like it could work with HBM, 5 or 10 fold increase in bandwidth, and 8+ GB cards as standard though. HSA would also be helpful there, unifying the CPU and GPU memory pools.

 

[S.H.O.D.A.N.]

If Keysplayr hadn't mentioned Borderlands used Gameworks I would have completely forgotten since that game works.

Isn't it just PhysX?

 

[tential]

Isn't it just PhysX?

I just meant like Nvidia "sponsored" titles.

 

[DarkKnightDude]

Some examples of typical 1080p gameplay. FXAA Ultra settings except for soft shadows which are off. No DSR.








Looks nice in some places while other places look honestly terrible.

 

[Zanovar]

It looks beutiful in lots of places,next gen ?hmm not sure about that or what it even means.as ive not played this game i think i will shut my buggy mouth.

 

[tential]

Thanks for those shots. This is what I expect at native 1080p. It seems most people who claim this game is visually amazing take shots indoors with settings cranked up. It does look nice, but only when you're playing at 1440p and have 700+ in graphics cards alone (not to mention HEDT platform, etc.). When I see shots at playable 1440p though it doesn't look that great but I also don't have a 1440p monitor so perhaps it's far better since I'm essentially just zooming in on the shot.

I'm still curious though as to 1080p with DSR. Downsampled screenshots of this game have looked fantastic so I'm wondering if DSR would help this game at 1080p. I'm not too interested in playing it now, but was thinking with crossfire 390x (assuming CF is ever fixed), it might be fun to play if it goes on sale for less than $5.

Otherwise, this game is really just a beta test for Victory.

 

[RussianSensation]

And SLI works just fine in AC Unity (despite the flickering issue), but AMD has not released any Crossfire profiles.

Does not compute when the flickering is so severe that it makes the game unplayable. Your outdoor screenshot shows horrible graphics for a 2014 game.

"So great job Ubisoft. That ‘rigorous quality control’ was spot on."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXU7wSf2PFc

Looks nice in some places while other places look honestly terrible.

Agreed. All the comments regarding low polygon NPCs, poor LOD in draw distance, poor textures up close, primitive/broken shadow/lighting model (arguable one of the most important aspects that makes games look realistic) are all evident in those gameplay screenshots. In some of those areas the game looks like a 2007-2008 PC game, but NPCs look like something out of PS3/360.

Thanks for those shots. This is what I expect at native 1080p. It seems most people who claim this game is visually amazing take shots indoors with settings cranked up.

I am sure you can find 10 screenshots where the game looks amazing over 5-10 hours of its campaign but when 90% of it looks like a 2008-2010 PC game, who cares.

I'm not too interested in playing it now, but was thinking with crossfire 390x (assuming CF is ever fixed), it might be fun to play if it goes on sale for less than $5.

That's one positive aspect of so many modern Ubisoft games: they are so broken in the beginning that by the time they are worth playing they are usually $5-10, which means until they are fixed or GPUs get fast enough to overcome their poor optimization, you can be rest assured that it's better to spend $ on other PC/console games.

 

[DarkKnightDude]

I'm still curious though as to 1080p with DSR. Downsampled screenshots of this game have looked fantastic so I'm wondering if DSR would help this game at 1080p. I'm not too interested in playing it now, but was thinking with crossfire 390x (assuming CF is ever fixed), it might be fun to play if it goes on sale for less than $5.

Here's some DSR shots for you.

Tried doing 4K DSR but frames were so bad couldn't even click on "save changes" lol.

1080p


3K or whatever you wanna call that res. 3325x1871


Bonus shots
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7536/15928518400_6f825e9863_o.png
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7515/16113970831_6725c07e35_o.png

 

[Carfax83]

Can you provide a screenshot or two Carfax with the resolution at 1080p? If you can use DSR even better.

I am viewing the screenshots but I see a ton of jagged edges but I'm on a 1080p screen so I'm zoomed in..

There's no need. I just remembered something crucial which changes everything associated with the jaggies..

FXAA is a shader based post process AA, so it CANNOT be captured by software such as FRAPS or DXTory.

That's why my screenshots appeared to have so many jaggies, because FXAA was not present in them.

Only hardware based AA like MSAA can be captured by FRAPs etcetera. Suffice to say, FXAA is still the best form of AA for playing AC Unity. It gets rid of 98% of jaggies for a nonexistent performance hit, and it doesn't have those weird white lines or dots that MSAA and TXAA have..

 

[Carfax83]

@ DarknightDude, looks like the image hosting site resized your 3K pic.

 

[tential]

Or you could simply have just provided the screenshots like DarkKnightDude did or just say "I'm not doing that."

The "Need" was that AC Unity screens look very good downsampled and I wanted to see if I could recreate that effect with DSR.

If you can't capture FXAA with a screenshot, then it would even further help your case of this being one of the best looking games by simply just using DSR instead. Lets be realistic here, 70%+ of this section will have access to DSR/VSR by the time the 390x is released which makes seeing how the game looks with those technologies even more relevant.

Anyway, from the 1 screenshot provided by DarkKnightDude the game does look nice downsampled from 3K. May even be better with Tessellation included if that feature ever gets added to this game.

 

[Final8ty]

Some examples of typical 1080p gameplay. FXAA Ultra settings except for soft shadows which are off. No DSR.




Looks nice in some places while other places look honestly terrible.

He looks out of place here, he looks like old school hand painted cartoon character super imposed onto the background

 

[Pantalaimon]

He looks out of place here, he looks like old school hand painted cartoon character super imposed onto the background

The effect in that screenshot looks like in those old FMV games.

 

[RussianSensation]

He looks out of place here, he looks like old school hand painted cartoon character super imposed onto the background

Exactly. The entire game is like this due the usage of pre-baked CPU-based lighting, instead of using dynamic global illumination on the GPU. What happens is a complete loss of emersion for objects, NPCs, the main character. If your shadow and lighting is not sophisticated, objects and characters cannot cast proper shadows and thus will appear floating in the air or as you described super imposed onto a scene. The shadow and lighting are so poorly done in Unity that whatever emersion is created by city architecture/detail is completely destroyed since you feel like the objects and characters and the game itself are not in tune with each other. It's like those old racing games where the car is floating on top of the racetrack.

Take a very close look in DarkKnightDude's DSR screenshots in post #92. Now spend 3 minutes to look at the shadows across the screenshot and you'll see that they are all fake. Buildings/towers cast no shadows on the characters underneath them, and people themselves don't cast proper shadows. If you look at the top left and top right sections, you can notice how some NPCs and objects cast no shadows at all! That's shocking for a 2014 game.

There are also sections in FC4 with HBAO+ where shadows in far draw distance (say shadows of trees on a hill) are completely broken/primitive but at least the God Rays in that game are beautiful.

 

[Carfax83]

Does not compute when the flickering is so severe that it makes the game unplayable.

And you know this how? Do you own the game? Do you have an SLI setup?

The answer to both questions is no. Fortunately for you I can answer those questions since I actually own the game and I use SLI. The flickering is annoying, but it's not so severe that it makes the game unplayable because it only affects water. And if it starts to rain in the game, the flickering goes away completely.

Hopefully Ubisoft will patch this out quickly, because it seems like a simple fix.

Exactly. The entire game is like this due the usage of pre-baked CPU-based lighting, instead of using dynamic global illumination on the GPU.

More nonsense. No game uses fully dynamic global illumination on the GPU. Dynamic global illumination is way too expensive for current PCs to handle, let alone consoles.

Most games use a combination of dynamic and baked lighting, including Crysis 3 and Metro Last Light btw.

Take a very close look in DarkKnightDude's DSR screenshots in post #92. Now spend 3 minutes to look at the shadows across the screenshot and you'll see that they are all fake. Buildings/towers cast no shadows on the characters underneath them, and people themselves don't cast proper shadows. If you look at the top left and top right sections, you can notice how some NPCs and objects cast no shadows at all! That's shocking for a 2014 game.

Never heard of draw distance I take it? Also, using PCSS shadows increases the draw distance for shadows. The reason why DKD's shadows look like that is because he has it on high, and is not using PCSS.

Amazing when you can actually answer questions about the game if you have it rather than parroting what other people are saying; most of whom don't even have it..

 

[tential]

Pcss performance hit is huge though.