Quality/Performance Issues in Assassin's Creed: Unity [WCCF]

[frozentundra123456]

I havent tried to play the game, both because I have a relatively low end system and mainly because it is not the kind of game that interests me.

That said, the WCCF Tech article doesnt really impress me though. I dont really see how the statement that there is a performance problem with certain cpu/gpu combinations can be construed as blaming AMD. As for the bolded part about draw calls and weak cpus in the consoles, it is not really documented who said what and how much is just an interpretation by WCCF Tech. As for the statement that the consoles have weak cpus, that is just the truth, dont know why so many are offended that Ubisoft told the truth.

OTOH, as a developer it is their duty to design a game that will perform within the limits of the hardware (be it for PC or console), so that is not really any excuse.

 

[NTMBK]

I feel seriously bad for the actual developers slaving away inside Ubisoft and trying to make a quality product. Obviously a lot of care went into making such a convincing looking Paris, and some of the work is absolutely beautiful. But it was clearly pushed out the door six months early by a greedy management who wanted to make the Christmas sales window, and then made to look ridiculous by idiotic PR departments.

If Valve or Nintendo were in charge, they would have kept the game into development until it was actually ready to ship. And it would be much better received for it, and preserve the reputation of the IP.

 

[chimaxi83]

Ubisoft response:

As previously reported on the Assassin’s Creed Live Updates Blog, our team is furiously working to resolve bugs and performance issues for Assassin’s Creed Unity on all platforms. On PC, some media outlets have misinterpreted a forum post indicating that we were working on resolving issues that were AMD-specific. We apologize for any confusion and want to be clear that we are working with all of our hardware partners to address known issues that exist across various PC configurations. We care deeply about a smooth and enjoyable Assassin’s Creed experience and we will continue to update customers as these issues are fixed via the AC Live Updates Blog.

http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/950269-Update-on-Performance-Issues?p=10338099#post10338099

 

[Grooveriding]

PC Gamer : Why our Far Cry 4 review is delayed

Right now, Far Cry 4 reviews are popping up all over the internet. It is, by all reports, a great game. Unfortunately, we can neither confirm or deny that assessment. More troubling, given the launch state of Assassin's Creed: Unity, is that we can't tell you how it performs on PC. The reason is simple: we haven't yet received code.


If you're getting a sense of deja vu, it's because exactly the same thing happened with Unity. For Far Cry 4, Ubisoft held a console review event; giving multi-platform outlets the chance to have their reviews in place for today's embargo. We, naturally, need to play the game on PC. Last night, we were informed that code wouldn't arrive until Tuesday, the date of the game's launch.


...


The difference, to my mind, is that Destiny is an MMO. Assassin's Creed: Unity is not. Far Cry 4 is not. They have online elements, yes, but they are not predominantly online games. As the gap between high and mid-range PC specs widens, as system requirements become increasingly more demanding, and as pre-order bonuses are marketed more aggressively; to also restrict reviews to being conceivably days after a game's launch is a worrying trend for consumers.

Looks like Far Cry 4 may be the next technical disaster from ubisoft.

 

[Carfax83]

OMG I can't believe you guys are this gullible

I wouldn't be surprised if gamers fell for this garbage, but supposed hardware enthusiasts? Truly, I am disappointed...

First off, the article came from WCCFTech. That alone should give you pause. Secondly, DX11 cannot even come close to issuing 50K draw calls, and Ubisoft's programmers aren't stupid enough to try and force it. Third, graphics programmers have tricks like instancing and batching that can drastically reduce the amount of draw calls per frame. Fourth, the article mentions NO SOURCE for that commentary. Fifth, no current game even comes close to 50K draw calls.

In fact, consoles cannot even handle that many draw calls. Consoles probably top out at around 20-25K. Only a PC with a powerful CPU and a thin API like Mantle or DX12 could hit that many draw calls..

So basically, the article is a fabricated lie, and you all fell for it :whiste:

 

[imaheadcase]

The problem with game developers is the publishers they have to deal with.

 

[SantaAna12]

Far Cry 1 was awesome, but Ubisoft only published it. Crytek developed it and later sold the rights to Ubisoft for subsequent releases.

^^^+1.

 

[96Firebird]

Where do they blame AMD in their statement? Can anyone point that out to me?

 

[Silverforce11]

Where do they blame AMD in their statement? Can anyone point that out to me?

They mention specifically AMD GPU & CPUs... it's almost as if they think those bugs don't occur on NV & Intel setups, which it does, the forum is full of tears from very pissed off buyers.

Their problem is releasing a unfinished turd.

 

[Cerb]

The CPU scaling showing speed improvements on CPU speeds just shows it may very well be draw call limited. That is what draw calls need, more core speed.

If more cores help, that may mean it's multithreaded well, but the problems with needing too many draw calls would still cause problems.

I'm not sure how you can say the draw call problem is BS based on those observations. They seem to confirm it if anything.

Faster CPUs performing better is not confirming such a bottleneck, unless you trace it and can find that. More cores performing much better, however, is somewhat evidence against it, as draw call limitations, should they not be boogeymen, should be limited in their ability to be multithreaded (IIRC, not at all for AMD, maybe a little bit for nV). Meanwhile, too many objects/actors for the CPU to manage, in terms of physics, AI, and rendering (in aggregate, not the pre-DX10 phantom of draw calls), could do exactly what's being found, especially if released too early for the content put in.

Why would there be too many draw calls, anyway, unless they had absolutely zero time to plan how it would be rendered? If that is the case, that would be absolutely moronic, and even worse than we usually expect from Ubisoft. It would also be an example of terrible management, that ends up costing more than if done better from the start.

 

[Cerb]

Where do they blame AMD in their statement? Can anyone point that out to me?

Go to OP. Click link. Read title.

If by, "they," you mean Ubisoft, well, they aren't quite that bad, however loathesome they may be. Wccftech is the, "they," here.

 

[frozentundra123456]

People sure are sensitive. I agree with Firebird. They did not say the game runs poorly
*because* of something AMD did. They are just saying there are issues with certain AMD cpu and gpu combinations. Seems like reasonable admission of a problem with the code, not an indictment of AMD. They certainly did not say "AMD hardware is crap, dont try to run our game on it." I would think AMD fans would welcome such a statement as an admission that there is some specific issue with this particular game, and they are trying to resolve it. I am not saying the game is well coded or does not have serious problems but to make such an issue out of that statement just seems absurd.

 

[tviceman]

I've said this many times over, Ubisoft is the worst PC developer in existence right now.

 

[96Firebird]

Go to OP. Click link. Read title.

If by, "they," you mean Ubisoft, well, they aren't quite that bad, however loathesome they may be. Wccftech is the, "they," here.

I meant Ubisoft. From what I can tell, they didn't "blame AMD" for anything.

Instead of just reading the title, I read the actual quote. Impressive, I know. :awe:

They mention specifically AMD GPU & CPUs... it's almost as if they think those bugs don't occur on NV & Intel setups, which it does, the forum is full of tears from very pissed off buyers.

Their problem is releasing a unfinished turd.

They didn't place blame on AMD, just said they work working together with them to find a resolution.

Seems a lot of you just took the article title for truth and went with it.

Similar situation happened with the performance of Nvidia cards when Ryse was released. Granted, the performance was "good enough" for most people in that game, but the developers worked with Nvidia and released both a patch and a driver update that greatly improved performance.

I guess Ubisoft should have just kept quiet and let the masses complain that nothing is being done. :hmm:

In a perfect world, the game would have been polished. It is apparent it was not, so they are now working to fix it.

 

[bystander36]

Why would there be too many draw calls, anyway, unless they had absolutely zero time to plan how it would be rendered? If that is the case, that would be absolutely moronic, and even worse than we usually expect from Ubisoft. It would also be an example of terrible management, that ends up costing more than if done better from the start.

Why? That is the question. Why did they decide they needed to have so many objects and people in the game at once? The more objects, the more draw calls.

Anyways, all that I'm saying is that there has been nothing shown that would prove that they didn't have too many draw calls.

 

[Carfax83]

Why? That is the question. Why did they decide they needed to have so many objects and people in the game at once? The more objects, the more draw calls.

Anyways, all that I'm saying is that there has been nothing shown that would prove that they didn't have too many draw calls.

bystander, the draw call issue has been severely exaggerated. The truth is, developers have tricks like batching and instancing to drastically reduce the draw call count.

For example, with instancing, the CPU can tell the GPU to draw 50,000 objects in a single call, provided that those objects are the same. Batching is less restrictive. I think the objects have to be similar in terms of their vertex data or some such, but not necessarily the same.

Just think, how many objects in a game world are truly unique? Not very many..

And Cerb is right. No developer would be stupid enough to make a game with such a high amount of draw calls when the consoles cannot even issue that many, and PC hardware is limited by the current DirectX..

 

[bystander36]

bystander, the draw call issue has been severely exaggerated. The truth is, developers have tricks like batching and instancing to drastically reduce the draw call count.

For example, with instancing, the CPU can tell the GPU to draw 50,000 objects in a single call, provided that those objects are the same. Batching is less restrictive. I think the objects have to be similar in terms of their vertex data or some such, but not necessarily the same.

Just think, how many objects in a game world are truly unique? Not very many..

And Cerb is right. No developer would be stupid enough to make a game with such a high amount of draw calls when the consoles cannot even issue that many, and PC hardware is limited by the current DirectX..

I still don't get that just because there are tricks that can be used to limit draw calls, that means that they used such tricks. After all, the game runs like crap, obviously the made some mistakes.

Not that I'm saying it is as such, but when refuting a sites info, you need more than, "it is possible".

 

[Deders]

You can see that a lot of the crowd npc's are repeated and even animate at exactly the same time. They also seem to appear randomly when they aren't wanted including in one video during a cutscene, rudely talking over the dialogue in someone's private office.

 

[Cerb]

Why? That is the question. Why did they decide they needed to have so many objects and people in the game at once? The more objects, the more draw calls.

The more objects, the more geometry, the more texture, the more different shaders. The more objects that can move about, the more physics and AI load. It also runs fairly slow and low-res on the consoles, after it was hyped originally not to do so (and, it's not like the rest of the world didn't know, well in advance, the approximate limitations of the new consoles). DX10+ allows batching of such calls, as they get put in queues, so if they didn't, or tried to add more than was reasonable, that's their own stupidity (to be clear, I mean management). The consoles have what approximates a HD 7850, and before release, the GPU alone could be saturated at 1080P on PCs. The room for getting better performance by low-level optimizations is a lot less this time around than it's ever been, as the hardware is only minimally funky.

Anyways, all that I'm saying is that there has been nothing shown that would prove that they didn't have too many draw calls.

"Confirm," is a bit more than that. There's no evidence so far for anything but that it runs fairly slowly for what graphics it offers, but scales well. I would take anything at this point with a grain of salt, except that there was poor project management by Ubisoft.

 

[Ryanrenesis]

Looks like there IS some truth to Ubisoft's statement:

Check out the performance disparity between AMD and Nvidia GPUs on this game. Especially when you consider SLI vs CrossFire, there seems to be a driver-related issue going on.

 

[escrow4]

Crysis 3 is a poor example. It didn't have a fraction of the stuff you have in a typical AC game. Its partially poor optimization and partially the game is just too much for "next-gen" consoles.

 

[Grooveriding]

Ubisoft ought to pack it on on PC. They can't release a decent PC game for the life of them. Go all in on console and if they can manage to release a few titles there that aren't broken, then try PC again. Their next-gen skeletor face tech is not going over well.

 

[iiiankiii]

Looks like there IS some truth to Ubisoft's statement:

Check out the performance disparity between AMD and Nvidia GPUs on this game. Especially when you consider SLI vs CrossFire, there seems to be a driver-related issue going on.

Nice. GameWorks in full effect. Proprietary API for the win? Disregard the Crossfire results, that can be fixed. Multi-GPU setups are always lagging behind on new games.

 

[96Firebird]

Nice. GameWorks in full effect. Proprietary API for the win? Disregard the Crossfire results, that can be fixed. Multi-GPU setups are always lagging behind on new games.

Welcome to the thread! Did you miss the part where Ubisoft made a statement saying they are working with AMD to fix this?

If you did indeed miss it, feel free to read their statement from the link in the original post!

 

[iiiankiii]

Welcome to the thread! Did you miss the part where Ubisoft made a statement saying they are working with AMD to fix this?

If you did indeed miss it, feel free to read their statement from the link in the original post!

Yeah, I know. I would have to guess that GameWorks have a lot to do with that. I would imagine it was much easier to get Nvidia's proprietary GameWorks to work on Nvidia's GPUs than AMD's GPU. I'm glad they're fixing it now rather than later. Good for all of us. I hope future developers work close to GPU makers to optimize their games BEFORE launch.