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

[Fire&Blood]

I'm not about to get new hardware just because of Unity but my first take was that I am CPU bound since lowering setting and resolution barely makes a dent in frame rate yet I see people with stock 2500k's (which my CPU is on par with) report much higher frame rates with equal Nvidia card counterparts.

 

[Teizo]

Hopefully they don't screw up next years new Splinter Cell.

 

[exar333]

LOL, terrible performance for a crap looking game.. heck, at least WD had a massive area and crazy draw distance and it didn't run THAT bad.

Wow, this says it all. That is horrible performance...

 

[Gikaseixas]

They better pay some overtime to their engineers and get that crap some tweaking. I'm not buying a new card just to play AC @ 1080p. Like the series but this is getting ridiculous

 

[RussianSensation]

What a terrible pc developer Ubisoft is - wait. Why do you bring up these console comparisons? :hmm:

Farcry on PC has HBAO+, PCSS, TXAA, better God Rays and better hair simulation.

How many console ports get these pc-exclusive features? Right.

Your bias against Ubisoft is not normal anymore.

/edit: And here are screens from the option menu of FC4: http://imgur.com/a/jxf27
Yeah, what a terrible pc developer Ubisoft really is. They give us so many options - why Ubisoft, why?

You couldn't be farther from the truth. I acknowledge fun games from Ubisoft like the Rayman Origins/Legends series, Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 seems to have none of the frame-rate issues and bugs of Unity. What I will not support is paying $50 for broken unoptimized games with hyped up average graphics (you can throw TXAA, PCSS, tessellation, HairWorks, but it doesn't guarantee an amazing looking game - clearly didn't work for Unity) from the same firm - Unity and WD. I'll continue buying the good Ubisoft games and skipping their turds until they hit $5 and are fully patched.

Frankly even FC4, while looking good, doesn't smell like a true next gen PC game either. Although it should be way more fun to play than Unity or WD. At least the technical team behind FC4 uses the FAR superior HRAA (Hybrid Reconstruction Anti-Aliasing) than the garbage that is FXAA/TXAA in Unity. You get all the benefits of SMAA and TXAA without any of the blur. Heck, they did such an outstanding job that FC4 on PS4 looks as good as Far Cry 3 maxed out on the PC. Click on the PS4 footage linked below and surprise * surprise *, the game doesn't look butt ugly like Unity does on consoles, while still achieving 30 fps on a "low end" PS4. How did they do this?!! It must be a miracle since I thought AMD CPUs and GPUs are worthless based on what the Unity technical team implied.

FC4 on PS4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK_9wJH5xkQ

I guess there is still hope for some teams still employed by Ubisoft.

 

[boozzer]

Screenshots of my rig with G1 GTX 970s getting 60 FPS at 1440p max settings with FXAA

So I suppose whoever it was with the 980 SLI that got 30 to 40 FPS just didn't know what they were doing :whiste:

he plays thousands of games. and showed a video of his playthrough. you um might want to show a video also of your awesome fps and setting, uncut :twisted: oh and less roof tops with almost nothing in sight :twisted: play the game instead of staring at the sky :twisted:

 

[RussianSensation]

Will be on the immediately next Techpowerup review.

That's hilarious! :biggrin:

It's true that TPU has been dropping the ball in the last 2 years and I started to notice their bias, including heavily favoured NV games and doing other questionable things.

BF4 - tested without Mantle, a free feature for GCN cards

Tomb Raider -- "In the interest of fairness, we disabled TressFX in our testing."

Hopefully they finally get rid of games that get 100 fps+ on modern hardware and replace them with FC4, Ryse Son of Rome, DAI, Unity, etc.

---
I don't particularly place too much faith in PCLabs either though as almost all of their reviews are heavily NV favoured, even in games where the rest of the internet shows AMD winning. Either way, 980 is beating 780Ti by 45% at 2560x1440 in their review, which is if we are to believe that data is nearly impossible to achieve unless NV/Ubisoft specifically optimized for Maxwell and did nothing for Kepler. Although, I can't trust their review since 290X is hanging with 780Ti which we know is not true from other reviews.

Seeing as this is coming from someone like you, I apologize... I'll back down a bit. The statement I made about AMD's GPUs a few posts back is really a joke, not serious at all.

Thanks! :thumbsup:

It's perfectly fine to state that you "prefer NV and Intel products" and leave it at that. You have to realize that products such as HD5850/5870 $259/369 and HD6950 unlocked to 6970 for $299, or HD290 for $399 is what forces NV to be even more competitive both in terms of performance and its launch schedule. 970 wouldn't have happened at $330 if it wasn't for aggressive pricing of R9 290 cards. Similarly, without Maxwell, AMD would have been resting on its laurels with 200 series.

 

[RussianSensation]

For 1600p GTX 980 scores 36.9 fps with FXAA
http://www.computerbase.de/2014-11/...diagramm-grafikkarten-benchmarks-in-2560-1600

For 1440p GTX 980 SC scores 43.8 fps with FXAA
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Assas...436/Specials/Test-Technik-Benchmarks-1142550/

^ In their analysis 980 loses 25% of its performance when paired with a quad-core Haswell @ 2.5Ghz. 290X only loses 7% with the same CPU. When we move down to 2 Haswell cores @ 3.5Ghz, 980's advantage over the 290X completely disappeared in Unity.

What this means it that any conclusions made on our forum such as AMD's performance tanks with lower end CPUs such as i3s by using COD:AW as proof (therefore suggesting AMD's cards need faster CPUs to take advantage of their GPUs) are incorrect generalizations across other games. We need to analyse the pairing of a CPU and GPU dependency on a game specific basis.

 

[96Firebird]

It must be a miracle since I thought AMD CPUs and GPUs are worthless based on what the Unity technical team implied.

Erm, no. Your blind hatred for Ubisoft is showing. They didn't imply anything, they said they were working with AMD to fix the problem.

Seriously, where do you people come up with this stuff?

 

[tential]

Erm, no. Your blind hatred for Ubisoft is showing. They didn't imply anything, they said they were working with AMD to fix the problem.

Seriously, where do you people come up with this stuff?

I think what he means is that the performance on Nvidia isn't stellar either and that BOTH companies are working to improve performance. If you look at most recent benches of this game there have been improvements on the Nvidia side. To imply they are only working with AMD and not Nvidia is kind of an offhanded way of saying only AMD has an issue.

 

[Keysplayr]

that is bs. I know for a fact that 980 sli is getting 30 to 40 fps. hell, someone even tested it with quad 980 sli and still get shit fps. and yes I am talking about max or almost max settings. why bother with anything if you got 980 sli. if a gamer got 1200$ of gpus, he will be expecting max in 1080p at the least.

You do huh?

With a single 980 and an i5 2500K @ 4.3 I'm getting averages in the 40 to 55fps range all the time in any scene. This is at 1920x1200 Ultra quality 4x MSAA Bloom HBAO+.

What am I missing.

I'll check again now. Using fraps I'll collect fps data into a line graph. Gimme a few minutes.

EDIT: Aww Jeeez. 800MB patch being downloaded. It'll be more than a few minutes.

 

[Final8ty]

Ubisoft Will Bring Mantle-like Performance Boost To All Platforms Thanks To New Renderer Architecture In ACU

A couple of days ago, we had the pleasure of interviewing Ubisoft’s Pipeline Technical Director, James Therien, who shared with us some interesting new information about the new Assassin’s Creed game. As you may have guessed, we asked James whether the PC version of ACU will be better optimized than its predecessor, to which James said that ACU packs a new render architecture that will scale well on multi-CPUs and will bring Mantle-like performance boost on all platforms.

As James told us when we asked him about ACU’s multi-CPU support:

“Globally, our engine scales very well to multiple cores. Unfortunately, we hit different bottlenecks on different platforms. Traditionally, on higher-end PCs, we would be graphic driver bound, negating the benefits of having more cores. On ACU we completely changed the renderer architecture to drastically reduce the number of draw-calls we make to the driver. You should see much more scalability on ACU.”

Naturally, we also asked James whether Ubisoft was interested in Mantle as that API would further reduce draw-calls. As James told us, Ubisoft has been hard at work rewriting its low-level renderer in order to bring Mantle-like performance boosts on all platforms.

“As I said, we totally rewrote the low-level renderer for ACU. One of the reasons is to deal with the same types of issues that are solved with Mantle and DX12. We’re finding ways to push the hardware to its limits.”

Our full interview with James will go live later this week, so stay tuned for more!

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/ubiso...s-thanks-to-new-renderer-architecture-in-acu/

So this is there take on Mantle and DX12 like performance.

 

[KaRLiToS]

You do huh?

With a single 980 and an i5 2500K @ 4.3 I'm getting averages in the 40 to 55fps range all the time in any scene. This is at 1920x1200 Ultra quality 4x MSAA Bloom HBAO+.

What am I missing.

I'll check again now. Using fraps I'll collect fps data into a line graph. Gimme a few minutes.

EDIT: Aww Jeeez. 800MB patch being downloaded. It'll be more than a few minutes.

Hey Key, are you gonna update your CPU mobo or you still don't feel the need to with so few improvements since 1155?

 

[tential]

Ubisoft Will Bring Mantle-like Performance Boost To All Platforms Thanks To New Renderer Architecture In ACU


http://www.dsogaming.com/news/ubiso...s-thanks-to-new-renderer-architecture-in-acu/

So this is there take on Mantle and DX12 like performance.

You should have seen what the game ran like before they did their Mantle/DX12 boost....

 

[Final8ty]

LOL

 

[Keysplayr]

AAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaallllrighty then. I did the AC Unity 792MB update. Now Assassins creed will not even start. Just hangs endlessly on the loading level screen with that weird Icon just spinning forever.
So, game was running fine until the update. Be warned people.

I might try uninstalling and re-installing the whole game. And good Lord the whole d/l was over 40GB. Yeaaarrghh.

 

[Keysplayr]

Hey Key, are you gonna update your CPU mobo or you still don't feel the need to with so few improvements since 1155?

IVY and Haswell were not compelling enough to upgrade from this trusty Sandy. For me.
I'm almost there, I just want to see what Broadwell brings to the table. I guess I'm due to upgrade just for the fact that more games are supporting more than 4 cores, so in light of that, I'm a candidate for an upgrade.

But as of right now, this 2500K at 4.3 is still very formidable.

 

[rtsurfer]

AAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaallllrighty then. I did the AC Unity 792MB update. Now Assassins creed will not even start. Just hangs endlessly on the loading level screen with that weird Icon just spinning forever.
So, game was running fine until the update. Be warned people.

I might try uninstalling and re-installing the whole game. And good Lord the whole d/l was over 40GB. Yeaaarrghh.

Case in point for the Awesomeness of Ubisoft & Unity.

 

[boozzer]

You do huh?

With a single 980 and an i5 2500K @ 4.3 I'm getting averages in the 40 to 55fps range all the time in any scene. This is at 1920x1200 Ultra quality 4x MSAA Bloom HBAO+.

What am I missing.

I'll check again now. Using fraps I'll collect fps data into a line graph. Gimme a few minutes.

EDIT: Aww Jeeez. 800MB patch being downloaded. It'll be more than a few minutes.

show a video of your awesome fps and setting, uncut. oh and less roof tops with almost nothing in sight like car's pictures. play the game instead of staring at the sky like car's screens.

do the above, is all I am asking. I am not stubborn () proof it and I will change my mind

AAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaallllrighty then. I did the AC Unity 792MB update. Now Assassins creed will not even start. Just hangs endlessly on the loading level screen with that weird Icon just spinning forever.
So, game was running fine until the update. Be warned people.

I might try uninstalling and re-installing the whole game. And good Lord the whole d/l was over 40GB. Yeaaarrghh.

I feel for you. can't you do a file integrity check? something like verify files/cache. a steam function. there is zero need to redownload everything.

 

[tential]

AAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaallllrighty then. I did the AC Unity 792MB update. Now Assassins creed will not even start. Just hangs endlessly on the loading level screen with that weird Icon just spinning forever.
So, game was running fine until the update. Be warned people.

I might try uninstalling and re-installing the whole game. And good Lord the whole d/l was over 40GB. Yeaaarrghh.

The game is running just fine that's the game.
Curious, what's your FPS on the loading level screen....

Sorry couldn't help myself lol.

I always love posts like these, because I end up just laughing and posting my FX-8350 beating out i-7 4770k in 3dmark tests built to run better on the 4770k.

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/2662078

You can play 3dmark?

 

[RussianSensation]

You should have seen what the game ran like before they did their Mantle/DX12 boost....

The best part of that interview, foreshadowing just what was coming to us....:whiste:

“As I said, we totally rewrote the low-level renderer for ACU. One of the reasons is to deal with the same types of issues that are solved with Mantle and DX12. We’re finding ways to push the hardware to its limits.”

BTW, even though FX8150 OC isn't going to compete with i5/i7s in Unity, a stock 8150 manages 41 fps minimum and 48 fps average at 1080P and 49/57 with a 4.0Ghz mild overclock.

In comparison, the fastest single GPU - 980 - only gets us 45 / 51. So blaming awful performance of Unity on the PC on AMD CPUs is a fail of an argument when a 980 would bottleneck the FX8150 4.0Ghz throughout the game. :awe:

 

[omeds]

I always love posts like these, because I end up just laughing and posting my FX-8350 beating out i-7 4770k in 3dmark tests built to run better on the 4770k.

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/2662078

I don't know what you're talking about, my 4770k at 4.8 beats your 8350 at 4.9 by around 40% with a CPU score of roughly 13k. :hmm:

Also, look at the CPU graph posted by Russian. AMD CPU's are woefully inferior for gaming when CPU bound performance is exposed.

 

[ShintaiDK]

DX12 or Mantle is not going to do anything for this game.

Its GPU limited on PC. Even an old i3 is more than enough.
On the consoles with lowlevel APi and whatever it gets 20fps because its CPU limited.(Xbox One better than PS4.)

 

[exar333]

I always love posts like these, because I end up just laughing and posting my FX-8350 beating out i-7 4770k in 3dmark tests built to run better on the 4770k.

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/2662078

Really disappointed with my score then. I only have 3/4 the cores as you, but 80% more performance (at a lower mhz to boot). :whiste:

 

[gamervivek]

^ In their analysis 980 loses 25% of its performance when paired with a quad-core Haswell @ 2.5Ghz. 290X only loses 7% with the same CPU. When we move down to 2 Haswell cores @ 3.5Ghz, 980's advantage over the 290X completely disappeared in Unity.

What this means it that any conclusions made on our forum such as AMD's performance tanks with lower end CPUs such as i3s by using COD:AW as proof (therefore suggesting AMD's cards need faster CPUs to take advantage of their GPUs) are incorrect generalizations across other games. We need to analyse the pairing of a CPU and GPU dependency on a game specific basis.

Don't see 980 dropping below 280x levels there, don't even see it falling behind 290x with similar cpu.