Benchmarked - Assassin's Creed: Unity
by Jarred Walton on November 20, 2014 8:30 AM ESTClosing Thoughts
There are two things you can count on with the fall gaming season: lots of games, and occasionally botched launches as publishers rush to release new titles in time for the peak of the holiday shopping spree. Ubisoft has three major games launching right now, Assassin's Creed: Unity came out last week, Far Cry 4 just released Tuesday, and The Crew launches next week. Obviously, they don't want to launch all three on the same day, but more than one person has come to the conclusion that ACU should have been delayed by a few weeks to get all the bugs worked out.
So far, there has been a Day 0 patch, then the current 1.2, and at least two more patches are planned I believe. The next should provide further bug fixes (and performance optimizations perhaps), while a later patch will also add tessellation support to the game. It's probably a good idea to get performance "fixed" as much as possible before adding tessellation, as it could simply reduce already low frame rates on a lot of systems.
My own experience with Assassin's Creed: Unity has thankfully been mostly uneventful. There was talk about missing textures and "faceless" people, but that's apparently only on unpatched versions – the Day 0 patch addressed that bug, and I know at least in my case I never saw it. Stability hasn't been perfect, but the second patch did a lot to address any crashes in my case – I've played for a few hours several times without crashing, though after a while it seems crashes are still possible.
By far the biggest concern however is performance. I'd say if you can average about 40FPS (with minimums in the mid-20s or above), Assassin's Creed: Unity is playable. The problem is that to get such frame rates, you basically need to go with Low settings on quite a few "midrange" GPUs, and even beefy GPUs like the GTX 980 aren't going to be happy with all settings maxed out at resolutions beyond 1080p. If you have the hardware, ACU is a great looking game and a good addition to the Assassin's Creed series. But for those running older GPUs – or AMD GPUs – you probably want to wait at least another month to see what happens before buying the game.
And if this is the shape of things to come, a lot of people might want a GPU upgrade this holiday season.
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JarredWalton - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I'll bet you a dollar you're CPU limited at mid to high 70s when you're down on the streets. Anyway, I ran the Medium numbers as well at 1080p, which is basically FXAA with High textures and a few other items turned down a notch that don't really affect things that much. As to what's "an accurate representation of the kind of performance you can get", well, the numbers don't lie. If you want to run different settings, the numbers change, but there's a reason the developers don't just use FXAA as the default at all settings.Carfax - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I probably am CPU limited with V-sync off, but considering I'm above 60 FPS and how much is being rendered (the game is absolutely massive in scope and detail), I would say that the engine is still fairly optimized. When I'm playing the game, my CPU is usually around 50 to 60% loaded on all 12 threads with V-sync on. I haven't tested CPU usage with V-sync off though.The game definitely uses a hex core processor, so that's probably why your frame rates are lower than mine..
mcmilhouse - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I wonder if Apple didn' take all the 20nm production this year, and amd/nvidia had 20nm cards, if we wouldnt have a $200-300 card that outputs 60fps easy at 1080p ultra. We really should of been at 20nm this year.Crazyeyeskillah - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Why don't u turn off AA and show people what the game can actually run at. I don't know why this is a must have when you can't get solid frame rates. If you ran all the same benches without any AA i don't see why it would be so abysmal. AA is a luxury not mandatory.JarredWalton - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
You mean like the 1080p Medium graph? That uses FXAA, which is nearly "free" to enable.Crazyeyeskillah - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
No, more on some of the high end numbers where aa starts to get redundant, especially at 4k. I loved crysis when it came out and it slapped my 7900gtx sli around because I knew it was the start of something great to come. This game does have some nice touches, especially in the quantity of npc's on the screen, use of ai and level of detail for such an expansive city, but is nowhere close to heralding in a new concept look of what's to come in terms of textures and reach. Most people are gonna set it to highest textures, turn off AA and get their playable fps at whatever resolution their card supports so I have to admit this is the first time i've really felt a little leary at the state of the game presented on ANANDTECH. I've been reading the site since it was launched but this game benchmark just didn't make me come off with a sense of what performance is really going to be like across various setups.FITCamaro - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I don't understand how they can do a poorer job of porting the game to PC on AMD hardware than Nvidia when the consoles are using AMD GPUs. Unless they built it for PC with Nvidia in mind and then did a crappy job of porting it to consoles. Of course given the poor performance of the game on consoles, that isn't hard to believe.Ubisoft is quickly becoming the new EA. I won't be buying this game this year. Probably in a year when it's down to $20 and they've maybe patched it to a reasonable state. I say maybe because Watch Dogs has been out for months and is still pretty bad.
FlushedBubblyJock - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
The bleeding edge has to be pushed, lest there be no need for more.Same thing was said about Crysis, then it wound up being the most famous FPS freak game ever, and still is, until perhaps now.
So getting down on the leading edge games that present a challenge to GPU designers is not in all of our best interest.
Also it's nice to see a "port" frustrate the highest end elite desktops and see the whining not be about how cruddy for any sort of gaming ported games are, but in this case how " slow my thousands of dollars are ".
Very glad too see it crushing the best of the best, we need more of this at a faster rate, then we hopefully won't hear so much about and so often " the increase with the new core isn't worth it ".
Now the GPU makers must overcome, a challenge is a good thing.
Horza - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
This would be a reasonable sentiment if in fact the game was "bleeding edge" graphically. Crysis was a landmark visually (and still looks impressive) and I feel very safe to wager that Unity will not be remembered in even close to the same way. Anyone can make a game that brings "elite" hardware to it's knees, it's not an impressive feat on it's own if it doesn't deliver the experience to justify it.Daggard - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
*shrug* runs fine on my PS4. I'd give it more of an 8.5 personally. Paris is the best playground yet for this series. Online features are still being ironed out, but the game is great :)