Ubisoft Responds to Low Frame Rates in Assassin's Creed Unity [Updates]

[ObscureMammal]

Source: http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/Ubisoft-Responds-Low-Frame-Rates-Assassins-Creed-Unity

 

(This is a portion of episode 326 of the PC Perspective Podcast that was cut out for individual viewing)

Over the last couple of days there have been a lot of discussions about the performance of the new Assassin's Creed Unity from Ubisoft on current generation PC hardware. Some readers have expressed annoyance that the game is running poorly, at lower than expected frame rates, at a wide range of image quality settings. Though I haven't published my results yet, we are working on a story comparing NVIDIA and AMD GPUs in Unity, but the truth is that this is occurring on GPUs from both sides.

 

For example, using a Core i7-3960X and a single GeForce GTX 980 4GB reference card, I see anywhere from 37 FPS to 48 FPS while navigating the crowded city of Paris at 1920x1080 and on the Ultra High preset. Using the Low preset, that frame rate increases to 65-85 FPS or so.

 

Clearly, those are lower frame rates at 1920x1080 than you'll find in basically any other PC game on the market. The accusation from some in the community is that Ubisoft is either doing this on purpose or doing it out of neglect with efficient code. I put some questions to the development team at Ubisoft and though I only had a short time with them, the answers tell their side of the story.

 

Ryan Shrout: What in the Unity game engine is putting the most demand on the GPU and its compute resources? Are there specific effects or were there specific design goals for the artists that require as much GPU horsepower as the game does today with high image quality settings?

 

Ubisoft: Assassin’s Creed Unity is one of the most detailed games on the market and [contains] a giant, open world city built to the scale that we’ve recreated. Paris requires significant details. Some points to note about Paris in Assassin’s Creed Unity:

• There are tens of thousands of objects are visible on-screen, casting and receiving shadows.
• Paris is incredibly detailed. For example, Notre-Dame itself is millions of triangles.
• The entire game world has global illumination and local reflections.
• There is realistic, high-dynamic range lighting.
• We temporally stabilized anti-aliasing.

RS: Was there any debate internally about downscaling on effects/image quality to allow for lower end system requirements?

Ubisoft: We talked about this a lot, but our position always came back to us ensuring that Assassin’s Creed Unity is a next-gen only game with breakthrough graphics. With this vision, we did not degrade the visual quality of the game. On PC, we have several option for low-scaling, like disabling AA, decreasing resolution, and we have low option for Texture Quality, Environment Quality and Shadows.

RS: Were you looking forward or planning for future GPUs (or multi-GPU) that will run the game at peak IQ settings at higher frame rates than we have today?

Ubisoft: We targeted existing PC hardware.

RS: Do you envision updates to the game or to future GPU drivers that would noticeably improve performance on current generations of hardware?

Ubisoft: The development team is continuing to work on optimization post-launch through software updates. You’ll hear more details shortly.

Some of the features listed by the developer in the first answer - global illumination methods, high triangle counts, HDR lighting - can be pretty taxing on GPU hardware. I know there are people out there pointing out games that have similar feature sets and that run at higher frame rates, but the truth is that no two game engines are truly equal. If you have seen Assassin's Creed Unity in action you'll be able to tell immediately the game is beautiful, stunningly so. Is it worth that level of detail for the performance levels achieved from current high-end hardware? Clearly that's the debate.

 

When I asked if Ubisoft had considered scaling back the game to improve performance, they clearly decided against it. The developer had a vision for the look and style of the game and they were dedicated to it; maybe to a fault from some gamers' viewpoint.

 

Also worth nothing is that Ubisoft is continuing to work on optimization post-release; how much of an increase we'll actually see with game patches or driver updates will have to be seen as we move forward. Some developers have a habit of releasing a game and simply abandoning it as it shipped - hopefully we will see more dedication from the Unity team.

 

So, if the game runs at low frame rates on modern hardware...what is the complaint exactly? I do believe that Ubisoft would have benefited from better performance on lower image quality settings. You can tell by swapping the settings for yourself in game but the quality difference between Low and Ultra High is noticeable, but not dramatically so. Again, this likely harkens back to the desire of Ubisoft to maintain an artistic vision.

 

Remember that when Crysis 3 launched early last year, running at 1920x1200 at 50 FPS required a GTX 680, the top GPU at the time; and that was at the High settings. The Very High preset only hit 37 FPS on the same card.

 

PC gamers seems to be creating a double standard. On one hand, none of us want PC-ports or games that are developed with consoles in mind that don't take advantage of the power of the PC platform. Games in the Call of Duty series are immensely popular but, until the release of Advanced Warfare, would routinely run at 150-200 FPS at 1080p on a modern PC. Crysis 3 and Assassin's Creed Unity are the opposite of that - games that really tax current CPU and GPU hardware, paving a way forward for future GPUs to be developed and NEEDED.

 

If you're NVIDIA or AMD, you should applaud this kind of work. Now I am more interested than ever in a GTX 980 Ti, or a R9 390X, to see what Unity will play like, or what Far Cry 4 will run at, or if Dragon Age Inquisition looks even better.

 

Of course, if we can get more performance from a better optimized or tweaked game, we want that too. Developers need to be able cater to as wide of a PC gaming audience as possible, but sometimes creating a game that can scale between running on a GTX 650 Ti and a GTX 980 is a huge pain. And with limited time frames and budgets, don't we want at least some developers to focus on visual quality rather than "dumbing down" the product?

 

 

 

 

UPDATE: Many readers in the comments are bringing up the bugs and artifacts within Unity, pointing to YouTube videos and whatnot. Those are totally valid complaints about the game, but don't necessarily reflect on the game's performance - which is what we were trying to target with this story. Having crashes and bugs in the game is disappointing, but again, Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed Unity aren't alone here. Have you seen the bugs in Skyrim or Tomb Raider? Hopefully Ubisoft will be more aggressive in addressing them in the near future. 

 

UPDATE 2: I also wanted to comment that even though I seem to be defending Ubisoft around the performance of Unity, my direct feedback to them was that they should enable modes in the game that allow it to play at higher frame rates and even lower image quality settings, even if they were unable to find ways to "optimize" the game's efficiency. So far the developer seems aware of all the complaints around performance, bugs, physics, etc. and is going to try to address them.

 

UPDATE 3: In the last day or so, a couple of other media outlets have posted anonymous information that indicates that the draw call count for Assassin's Creed Unity is at fault for the poor performance of the game on PCs. According to this "anonymous" source, while the consoles have low-level API access to hardware to accept and process several times the draw calls, DirectX 11 can only handle "7,000 - 10,000 peak draw calls." Unity apparently is "pushing in excess of 50,000 draw calls per frame" and thus is putting more pressure on the PC that it can handle, even with high end CPU and GPU hardware. The fact that these comments are "anonymous" is pretty frustrating as it means that even if they are accurate, they can't be taken as the truth without confirmation from Ubisoft. If this turns out to be true, then it would be a confirmation that Ubisoft didn't take the time to implement a DX11 port correctly. If it's not true, or only partially to blame, we are left with more meaningless finger-pointing.

[ThyFeared]

Repost but you posted a nicer post  http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/250129-ubisoft-responds-to-low-frame-rates-in-assassins-creed-unity/

[Mush Brain]

Old... and i already made this thread.

[Jobbe03]

Old... and i already made this thread.

Mammal's thread is way better though

[Mush Brain]

Mammal's thread is way better though

It is.

[RH00D]

Old... and i already made this thread.

They're 20 minutes apart and this one actually followed the news topic guidelines.

[ObscureMammal]

Old... and i already made this thread.

You beat me to it while I was making my coffee 

[Zeke]

Newsflash, Ubisoft: it doesn't even come close to Crysis 3.

[Mush Brain]

They're 20 minutes apart and this one actually followed the news topic guidelines.

I guess the video is not the entire thing?

[Real_PhillBert]

I have a growing disdain for Ubisoft. They seem to be full of shit every time they say anything. 

[Real_PhillBert]

Newsflash, Ubisoft: it doesn't even come close to Crysis 3.

I havent played ACU, but I was thinking the same thing.

[RH00D]

I guess the video is not the entire thing?

It is but these are the guidelines from sticky thread in this section.

 

 

Here are a few rules/requirements to posting in the News section.Note - this is not an exhaustive list:

1. Must have some original input along with the news story from the member on why it is news to them and/or the forum!
2. Your post cannot simply be a link to another news source - see point 1!
3. When quoting or copying content into your post from the original, you must make it very clear that you are doing so with the use of quotations, for example, or some other means.
4. Topic titles should reflect the content (your title may be altered if it isn't indicative enough)

 

[Mush Brain]

It is but these are the guidelines from sticky thread in this section.

Ubisoft was the explanation of the news.

[That Norwegian Guy]

Classic Ubisoft. Blame-shifting and excuses instead of apologies. I just hope they keep going like this until they go bankrupt.

[LemonSpice]

Ubisoft is an idiot

[Cheddle]

snip

 

I feel for ubi... I really do... they tried to push the envelope rather than conform to the current console gen tech and have been flamed for it...

 

Maybe if our current consoles were more than a half Wii-u / half top-spec gaming machine the game would run better...

 

Im buying it on PS4 - ill likely torrent it on PC just to see how it really performs and looks on this platform. ill see if 4k is even possible.

[Higgl3]

 

Remember that when Crysis 3 launched early last year, running at 1920x1200 at 50 FPS required a GTX 680, the top GPU at the time; and that was at the High settings. The Very High preset only hit 37 FPS on the same card.

 

PC gamers seems to be creating a double standard. On one hand, none of us want PC-ports or games that are developed with consoles in mind that don't take advantage of the power of the PC platform. Games in the Call of Duty series are immensely popular but, until the release of Advanced Warfare, would routinely run at 150-200 FPS at 1080p on a modern PC. Crysis 3 and Assassin's Creed Unity are the opposite of that - games that really tax current CPU and GPU hardware, paving a way forward for future GPUs to be developed and NEEDED.

 

The thing is, The Crysis games are hugely taxing on hardware, but this strain directly translates to AMAZING VISUALS.

 

AC Unity is ridiculously hard to run... and looks just like any other Assassins Creed game but with huge graphical bugs and visual anomalies

 

Gamers would buy this excuse if AC Unity actually looked amazing, but thanks to a host of other issues, it just doesn't.

 

Something can be hard to run and still look like rubbish (think goat simulator or octodad)

[deathjester]

LOL at them blaming AMD when the Games Works library is CLOSED and real "journalists" pointed this out a long time ago. 

 

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/173511-nvidias-gameworks-program-usurps-power-from-developers-end-users-and-amd

 

AMD can contact them and they can contact AMD as much as they want. What will happen? Not much. Why? Cus Nvidia controls what they can look at/access. Games Works will also render things with a STUPIDLY high cost to an Nvidia GPU to get an edge at something it is better at than an AMD GPU, for little to no visual payoff, so the game runs like crap for everyone. 

 

Any website failing to mention this in their articles is a JOKE as far as "journalism" goes. 

[Faa]

Seems like the CPU bottleneck seems to be awful in this game, 50 fps on low settings on a 980?

[othertomperson]

On what planet is a 3960X and a GTX 980 "lower end"?

 

By the time PC specs enough to run this at as crap as res as 1080p are mainstream the game will look so dated.

 

 

Seems like the CPU bottleneck seems to be awful in this game, 50 fps on low settings on a 980?

 

There's no excuse for there to be a CPU bottleneck on that processor, even now.

[smjpl]

I feel for ubi... I really do... they tried to push the envelope rather than conform to the current console gen tech and have been flamed for it...

 

Maybe if our current consoles were more than a half Wii-u / half top-spec gaming machine the game would run better...

 

Im buying it on PS4 - ill likely torrent it on PC just to see how it really performs and looks on this platform. ill see if 4k is even possible.

 

My whole gripe with Ubi is how they handled their PR. Don't come out with bullshit and you won't get slated. Simple as that.

 

All they had to say was "we're going for graphics detail over resolution and high fps; so that means 798p and 30fps on consoles". Instead they try bullshit people by saying "were going for the cinematic feel". Then they try back up their bullshit with stupid comments such as "fps is only a number" blah blah blah.

 

Be open with the community and the community will appreciate you all the more for it. That is all the community ever really wants. Transparency!

[Guest Kloaked]

Did anyone actually watch this video?

 

I'm sitting here wanting to punch my monitor because these guys don't get it. The way the game looks does not justify the performance being tanked. One of the co-hosts implied that players should turn their resolution down to 900p instead of 1080p and it will run fine.

 

whatthefuckican'tevenrightnowplsstopthis

[Plasma]

after watching totalbiscuit video he said to disable AA and i did i went for high with AA on with 20-40fps to 50-60 with no AA at 1080 on a 290

[Biggerisbetter]

The men in video have lost all creditably and have proven not to be a trusted source of information.

[kirBi]

This pretty much illustrates the idiocy of Ubisoft. Visual quality is important when the game is playable.