Assassin's Creed Unity thread

[chimaxi83]

Will I get frame rates the age of a child as well with tessellation enabled?

@Redhawk
To be fair, Ubisoft probably thought you really would need an HD7970 to play their game at minimum acceptable settings.

Yes you will, but a 4.9GB patch from Ubisoft and beta drivers from Nvidia will get you to teenager.

 

[tential]

Yes you will, but a 4.9GB patch from Ubisoft and beta drivers from Nvidia will get you to teenager.

How many Nvidia cards do I need?

Edit: Seems the newest patch helps quite a bit.
Unless you're a SLI user, then flickering ground textures is your fun!

I wonder if anyone will rebench this game now that they're officially done patching it for performance issues.

 

[escrow4]

Minimum FPS and specs are never adequate and never will. If all you can muster is minimum buy a console. I've posted screenshots and while the game isn't exactly a looker the amount of detail and stuff packed in is massive. And yes I have a 5930K and no doubt that helps the minimum FPSs a lot. Every single AAA game over the last month or two has recommended and can use a quad (minus FC4). They do scale to those threads.

On GPU the 680 and 7970 are old and are running out of puff. You want to render everything in Unity with settings pushed up on 2012 era hardware? And achieve smooth 60FPS?

Plus:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-assassins-creed-unity-face-off

". . . . . suggesting that large numbers of NPCs and a CPU bottleneck are the causes of the major drops in smoothness we see elsewhere."

"It seems that Assassin's Creed Unity has significant CPU optimisation issues."

Time for a 5820K+!

 

[Carfax83]

This point just comes down to the fact that I wasn't discussing the CPU requirement.

The GPU and CPU can very much be discussed separately. While I realize that an idiot can easily mismatch and create a bottleneck, my discussion of parts was centered wholly on the GPU choice for the minimum spec.

I don't think you can easily separate the CPU and GPU in such a discussion. The CPU is in fact, typically the weak link when it comes to PC optimization, because the API overhead affects it the most, and it's also harder to optimize effectively for.

AC Unity does not disappoint in this regard though, because the engine scales across multiple cores beautifully..

And you keep bringing up the overhead and latency. The R9 270 and GTX 660 are much more powerful than what's in the console. The overhead is easily compensated for. You can disagree, just stop explaining it to me like I haven't thought about even though I've mentioned it every single time.

API overhead can easily be mitigated with sufficiently powerful hardware, but I don't know about latency. That really depends on your hardware configuration, as well as how well the engine is optimized for PC hardware.

Other than IPC, one of the reasons why Intel CPUs decimate AMD CPUs in gaming is because they have a tremendous latency advantage due to the far superior cache performance and also because the PCI-e controller is on die so communication with the GPU and system memory takes less time.

It seems that, at least to me, we've managed to find some common ground on everything else. That suits me.

Yep, we finally agree on something finally..

 

[Carfax83]

DAI is 900p on Xbox One, 1080p on PS4. And those frame rates aren't always solid for DAI either, but they're not a hot mess like ACU's frame rates.

Well, that's kind of a shame then because DAI isn't rendering near as much detail as AC Unity..

Sounds quite a bit like how you can seamlessly enter and leave most buildings in DAI, too.

Yep, but maps aren't as seamless as in AC Unity. In AC Unity, the only loading screens you will see is the first initial load, or a fast travel load and the latter is optional.

Also, buildings in DAI are nowhere near as detailed as they are in AC Unity. That's one thing where I have to tip my hat off to Ubisoft. Their artists are fantastic, and their recreation of 18th century French architecture and interior decoration is flat out amazing!

Here are some examples from the screenshot thread on the AC Unity forums which I started. These are 1080p and I don't know whether he used maxed settings or not, but they still convey the scale and detail found in the game..

I'll believe it when I see it. As it is, ACU currently runs worse than DAI does on all platforms, and that's with tessellation enabled in DAI and no tessellation in ACU.

I'm eagerly awaiting the tessellation patch myself as well..

If anything, minimum requirements should target somewhat below the console experience, by taking out things on consoles like high resolution shadows, ambient occlusion, lowering texture resolution, etc.

I have a hard time believing that people with rig specs below even what consoles can offer, would play a game like AC Unity.

They would do that because they don't want to limit themselves to a small percentage of the PC market with relatively high-end gaming rigs, the kind of people who spend $1000+ all at once on a gaming rig.

Assassin's Creed has never really been a big seller on PC. It's mostly a console series..

You really just don't seem to be getting the point of minimum system requirements.

What I think is sort of irrelevant since I never came up with the system requirements in the first place. I just don't believe that people with low end systems would play a game like this though in the first place..

It's very hardware intensive, especially on the CPU..

 

[Carfax83]

Will I get frame rates the age of a child as well with tessellation enabled?.

Didn't you say you have a 7950? Tahiti doesn't handle high tessellation levels well so I'd say yes..

 

[tential]

You guys should see Carfax's screenshots of this game. They look NOTHING like the screenshots he cherry picks from other people (in which as he admits at least, he has 0 idea what settings they're running).

In fact, these screenshots are far worse than the ones you normally put up of this game.

What I will give you Carfax is AC Unity can look amazing. People who downsample 1080p from 2x the resolution have amazing screenshots. The issue is, you can't PLAY at that quality due to the horrendous optimization the AC Unity team has done.

AC Unity CAN be a beautiful game, it could have been by far, the best game graphically given the level of detail in the game. The team ruined it though by making a poor engine that has horrendous issues for no reason.

People on Reddit/Neogaf are still complaining about FPS issues and straight unplayability sometimes on high end cards like the GTX 780 Ti, GTX 970, etc.
------------

You're wrong on the people playing AC Unity with low specs. You could check, oh I dunno, ANYWHERE? and see tons of people attempting to play the game with low specs. But like we both agree on, people should have read the minimum specs. That's their fault, even if Ubisoft put them at a ridiculously high standard, you should read the specs before purchasing the game.
------------------

As for my tessellation joke, I'm betting tessellation will be another FPS killer on this game. I have 0 intention of playing it now.
Maybe in 2 years when I can down sample it from 4K to 1080p (Even 60% down sampling shots that one member posted in the AC Unity thread on the VC section look great. This game needs downsampling to look good, any shot I see of this game makes me want to puke, but when I see downsampled shots that smooth it out, it makes me wish there were cards with enough GFX horsepower to actually make this game look like it should).

 

[Carfax83]

The screenshots don't really accurately depict how great the game looks. Some games just look much better in motion than they do in stills, and AC Unity is one of them..

Anyway, now that patch 1.4 fixed TXAA, it looks amazing in this game! All the annoying texture crawling is basically gone, and the game looks so much cleaner as a result! NVidia has really improved the technology, as the blurring effect is becoming less and less noticeable.

If only the performance hit wasn't so massive. TXAA only has one setting, which is presumably TXAA 4x. AC IV had two settings, TXAA 2x and TXAA 4x. TXAA 2x has a much more forgiving performance hit than 4x, so it's a shame that they didn't implement it in AC Unity.

As for my tessellation joke, I'm betting tessellation will be another FPS killer on this game. I have 0 intention of playing it now.

Modern cards can easily handle tessellation now, unlike the early DX11 generation cards like Fermi so I doubt it will be the performance killer that you claim it will.

Not sure how AMD will fare with it on though, as AMD has historically had much lower tessellation performance than NVidia..

 

[Red Hawk]

Modern cards can easily handle tessellation now, unlike the early DX11 generation cards like Fermi so I doubt it will be the performance killer that you claim it will.

Not sure how AMD will fare with it on though, as AMD has historically had much lower tessellation performance than NVidia..

Well, the way AMD and Nvidia approach tessellation lead to performance differences, which on the high end left AMD at a disadvantage but didn't always end up in Nvidia's favor.

Nvidia integrated a "Polymorph" geometry engine into each unit of shaders starting with Fermi. This meant that the more shader units they added, their geometry performance automatically went up. But it also meant that geometry performance unavoidably went down whenever they cut down shader units. For example, as you move down GK104 from a 680 to a 670 and 660 Ti, you lose considerable geometry performance, and GK106 even more so. There's no way around that.

AMD's geometry engine design, on the other hand, is separate from their shader units. They are free to add (or remove) geometry engines on the chip without regard for shader units. This lead to the interesting situation where theoretical geometry performance across Tahiti, Pitcairn, and Bonaire chips is the same. The 7970, 7950, 7870, 7850, and 7790 all have the same amount of geometry hardware.

So while high-end Nvidia chips have more geometry performance than their AMD contemporaries, the gap is going to be smaller in the mid range as Nvidia is giving up more geometry performance while AMD is not. The 7870, 7850, and 7790 are going to compare more favorably in geometry performance to the 660, 650 Ti w/Boost, and 650 Ti.

 

[escrow4]

Those screenshots are rubbish. I posted ingame screenshots and they look nothing like that. I'll see if I can post some more from 1.4 but the game doesn't look that good.

 

[sxr7171]

What's with that crazy foggy, bloomy/gloomy look in this game? I'm finding it very annoying. It's like everything is covered with a smoky haze and the camera seems to hunt for exposure as the bloom in some scenes is ridiculous and I have bloom off. Some of indoor scenes look nice but outdoors is almost headache inducing.

 

[psolord]

Please excuse the bump.

I made a video regarding the image quality and the performance hit, the various AA modes bring, on a GTX 970@1.5Ghz.

Assassin's Creed Unity - Anti aliasing modes comparison and performance (GTX 970)

Going from 64fps FXAA to 30fps 8XMSAA is not worth it imo.

Also the card took a dip to 7fps when I went from 4XMSAA to 8XMSAA, which gave me quite a scare to be frank, because the framebuffer usage indication of MSI AB jumped quite above 3.5GBs...and...you know....! But thankfully it got steady to 30fps right after that.

 

[poohbear]

so... is this game fully patched up now, or are there still a lot of bugs?

 

[ocre]

so... is this game fully patched up now, or are there still a lot of bugs?

Started playing it about a week and a half ago.

I wasnt expecting the experience i got because of all the negative hate it got. I found the game smooth and very visually impressive. TXAA is by far the best AA in my opinion and this is game has so many fine details i think its very important. Its been very pleasant for me. I find myself many times just admiring the beauty. Its packed full of stunning scenery.

I am really impressed and the engine feels really solid to me.

Dont know what patch i am on or what it was like before. But i just started playing last week and am impressed

 

[tential]

so... is this game fully patched up now, or are there still a lot of bugs?

If you don't own the game I don't suggest picking it up right now though even though it still is pretty good on Nvidia cards.
Another decent sized patch is in the works so I'd at least wait for that to hit and play the game with that patch included.

 

[finbarqs]

i'm on my gtx 780 still (original) on a 4770k. doesn't perfect stutters between 30 and 60... However Far Cry 4 is something I'm immensely enjoying right now...

 

[ocre]

I have had a couple crashes which seemed to improve once I put my gtx980 back to stock. I find it very strange because I can run my GPU 1500mhz on everything else but was crashing running unity at a smaller 1400mhz overclock.

Seems to not like overclocking, not sure. Need to play more to see.

 

[Fire&Blood]

I gave this another try after seeing this thread revived. On the sig rig, @1440p and maxed out except for shadows on high and FXAA I now get up to 50fps, used to be up to 30 and up to 20 with the 7950.

Now that it's actually playable, I started another play through, with HUD off. I don't remember it looking this good.

 

[ocre]

I just want to update. The game started crashing and i thought removing my gpu overclock fixed it but when the i got stuck in the server bridge. Couldnt progress. Load the game, take 8 steps and "acu.exe stopped working". I was completely stuck. Tried many times. If i started a new memory before i walked it would load. Very strange.

Anyway, long story short....I was browsing the ubisoft forums and actually found some random suggestion that ended up being exactly my issue. Verify files. I didint think it would work but i let uplay scan and check all my AC unity files and when it was done it the report said found issues that it needed to fix. Took literally 5 seconds to fix whatever issues it was supposed to have found and then like magic, no more crashing. Got out of the server bridge and after hours of everything being smooth, i tried overclocking my GPU again. No crashes now. Didnt really push the OC too much but all seems fine now.

Its really wierd because i never had issues that caused me to have to verify files uplay files before. Dont know how it happened but if anyone has similar issues with crashing, it absolutely took care of it for me. Its been more solid every since.

But yeah, i keep getting side tracked in this game. Doing side missions and taking it really really slow. There is just so much beauty. The graphics arent the best but the art and polish is really really good. The multiple lighting and light bouncing. The temporary over brightness when you come out of darker areas, that simulation of your eyes adjusting. I mean, i can go on and on. Its really got a lot going on, a lot going for it.

I know its had its issues, but its really got some nice graphics.... playing it in ultra at least.

Well, i play in custom. Ultra everytning but i am using TXAA which looks much better than the ultra MSAA in this game. I think its just as much or more tacing too. I just notice a lot of stuff the msaa misses in this game. FXAA or TXAA seem better to me. There is far too much small tiny detail. I am not a huge AA person but this game absolutely needs it. Far far too much small tiny details in every direction.

 

[RussianSensation]

Those screenshots are rubbish. I posted ingame screenshots and they look nothing like that. I'll see if I can post some more from 1.4 but the game doesn't look that good.

They look like DSR/down-sampled with SweetFX too.

The game looks average at best, with fog in many places too.

Really average graphics and textures, and low polygon character models, poor details in the draw distance, a very primitive pre-baked shadow and lighting model - everything reiterated for months about this game. So much hype for a next gen AC game that could have been. Maybe AC Victory will be that game.

 

[AdamK47]

Is the game worth buying yet?

 

[96Firebird]

Is the game worth buying yet?

It's a pretty fun time waster, as you can see from the most recent posts by those who own and play the game. As for those who just show up to complain about a game they haven't played... Well, you know the saying about opinions.

 

[RussianSensation]

Well, you know the saying about opinions.

Right because other than the performance issues, this game actually got amazing reviews about its storyline and gameplay? Oh wait, the reviewers actually ignored the performance issues and bugs and gave the game a fair shot by looking at the gameplay and storyline -- which were rubbish:

"Those issues can undoubtedly be fixed by a patch somewhere down the road, but that patch seems unlikely to fix Unity's biggest flaw: it's just not very much fun. For all its hugeness and graphical splendor, Unity is starved for excitement. It's much too concerned with a story that feels confused by itself, wasting potentially interesting allies and antagonists in much the same way that it wastes the rich, violent history of its time period. The most interesting missions in the game come far too late, representing glimpses of a better game than the one you just spent hours playing. Even as a tech demonstration, Unity fails to captivate outside of its stunning art design."
http://www.giantbomb.com/reviews/assassins-creed-unity-review/1900-686/

"As I write this, Assassin’s Creed: Unity is a bugfest, but technical problems, however annoying, can and probably will be fixed. It is not cracks in textures that it is the most worrying thing about Unity, but the cracks in game design and writing." - Riot Pixels

"An amazingly beautiful and dull adventure that takes the series well established elements and let's you repeat then yet again in an uninspired infinity. Not even hardcore fans should make excuses for this barely done game of bugs and routine work. Actually they should be the most upset. With Unity the series has gone from it's best to maybe it's worst."~ Level7

"Mild improvements in traversal and combat are quickly overwhelmed by the creaking systems onto which they have been grafted. Revolutionary Paris is one of the most beautifully realised environments in a series that has had its fair share of them, but the game you play doesn't really do it justice." ~ EuroGamer

"Unity’s metanarrative turns something specific into something simple, general, a clean way to experience a false history devoid of any attempt to explore what made the era so significant." Kill Screen

"Despite the title, Unity is all over the place, a jack-of-all-trades that seems almost determined not to master any of its fundamental components" ~ Slant Magazine

GameSpot called it one of the most disappointing games of 2014 and it wasn't even a contender for any platform's genre/game of the year.

If one wants to waste time, Evolve is a better way to do that.

 

[ocre]

They look like DSR/down-sampled with SweetFX too.

The game looks average at best, with fog in many places too.

Really average graphics and textures, and low polygon character models, poor details in the draw distance, a very primitive pre-baked shadow and lighting model - everything reiterated for months about this game. So much hype for a next gen AC game that could have been. Maybe AC Victory will be that game.

dont think its being offered as an nvidia bundle anymore. Perhaps you can let people who have the game discuss it now.

Thanks.

 

[Fire&Blood]

That's a little harsh IMO, he does raise a few valid points...

People that followed this thread from the start know how much I criticized Unity but to be fair, now it looks and runs good. FXAA and shadows on high, max settings @1440p: