Report: Assassin's Creed: Unity Frame Rate Problems Across Consoles - Update

[A.K.B.]

You know what's funny...
AC Rogue, the AC game that has just been released along with Unity _and presumably no one knows about_ for the older consoles has been claimed, by multiple reviewers, _as of now_ to be a much superior game to unity, and one of the better AC games to come in terms of story and characterization .....
if only UbiShait hasn't limited its release for old-gen, and foreshadowed it at the expense of launching a clunky mess of an eye candy that is Untidy/Unity/whatever....

 

[A.K.B.]

Spoiler

is this what you get if Shallow-man/invisible-man encountered lynchanthropy ?
( thnx for making my day man XD )

captcha : woof woof

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[DataSnake]

That sure looks like a hell of a lot more than 5 people to me.

You seem to think that if a game is optimized for rendering fairly large crowds, and is set to have a relatively low draw distance as a result, it should just up and change it's render setting on a whim when it isn't displaying as many people.

That would be pretty tricky. They could, however, design the game to hide the engine's shortcomings. For example, they could make it so that characters can only spawn in when they're not directly in the player's line of sight: create an invisible NPC programmed to evade the player, have it duck around the nearest corner, and as soon as it's out of view THEN you set it to visible and give it its usual AI. Or, if they wanted to be really fancy, there are even ways they could take advantage of that sort of limitation. For instance, Silent Hill 2 has a terrible draw distance, but they made that a part of the game by cloaking the distance in either fog or darkness and using it to help create an "anything could be out there" feel. Or, for an example that could be copied almost verbatim by Unity, Saints Row IV covers the pop-in you get from moving across the open world far faster than the engine was designed to allow behind deliberate graphical glitches which, though they certainly can get annoying, contribute to the fact that you're in a virtual world that's rapidly falling apart. Ubisoft could have written something into the story about how the Animus isn't working as well as it used to, possibly due to interference by the ancient race that made the Pieces of Eden, and played up the glitches as signs that human technology is failing, thus creating more urgency in the player's search for important memories.

 

[Alex Baas]

Hmmm, I'm still gonna reserve my own judgement for after I play the game. The interwebz usually has a tendency to overblow problems, so I'll bide my time and see if its as bad as they say on Friday.

Hard to say its overblown when people just two posts above you show proof of the great things to come with AC unity.

Spoiler: hidden for courtesy

truly, this game was made with millions of dollars and an eye for artistry

don't regret letting the next gen apologists preach their rhetoric for a second

down with nintendo forever, we need more ARTRY ART and MATURE GROWNUP THINGS

lowgraphx are limiting our imaginations but bigger numbers means limitless potential!

This generation of consoles has truly gone backwards as much as possible except for the WiiU. That console that everyone laughed (including myself) thinking would be dead when the Ps4 and Xbox one came out is actually gaining traction with good games.

At this point we should reevaluate the question of whether or not the Wii U even needs third party support if this is what third party support looks like. Seriously, do they need it? I don't know

 

[Alex Baas]

Wow. Just...wow. I thought the people complaining about it were just finding reasons to hate on the game but that's just plain bad. The PC version apparently doesn't fare much better as the specs are stupid high for minimum and just showing signs of bad porting. For something like this, I don't blame consoles having gimped hardware (I actually think their fine). I blame Ubisoft not knowing how to make a game right.

No no no. There was a gif of how low the draw distances were with enemies popping up right in front of your face. The Crowds they showed at E3 were outright lies. In some footage, there was LESS NPCs on the streets than last Ass Creed games.

And then you have Ubisoft's shitty textures somehow taking up 2GB of VRAM. Skyrim had better textures and it only had 512MB of RAM. Skyrim looked and played better on 1/4th the power of the next gen.

I have been looking at reddit and they have been tearing ubisoft a new ass hole.

Think Watch Dogs was bad at keeping its promises? You haven't seen anything yet.

Oh and here is Ass Creed Maxed out:

That is some last gen shit right there. 2Gb of ram my ass.

A modded version of Skyrim still looks better than anything of this gen and still takes up less space on my hard drive. I am running 2-4k textures and an ENB btw.

 

[BleedingPride]

I don't actually have that much trouble with it, though i do get the occasional jitter and that's poor craftsmanship.

 

[shrekfan246]

This game was released today, right?
Was there some review embargo?

If you were to treat TB's speculation as having any value, they were waiting on the day 1 patch in hopes that they didnt have to downgrade the review score and risk getting blacklisted by Ubisoft.

Or thats what i got out of a few posts on his Twitter page.

The review embargo was set for noon EST on the day of release. Which, for those unfamiliar with review embargoes, is an extremely oddly late time frame and generally only manifests when companies know there are massive problems that the critics are likely to latch on to. They don't want that information getting out before the really early adopters decide to jump on the sale, because if they see a critique that shows how terrible the performance of the game is, they might wait.

And yeah, it is generally taken as a given that the media are going to adhere to those deadlines, because getting advance copies of games are how they get reviews out in a timely manner in the first place. Websites need to get their reviews out in a timely manner if they want to make the most out of people who are going to be looking for information on a game. Once you're a few weeks behind the release, you're not going to get the same kind of traffic (unless you make something "controversial" like Tito's reviews of Dragon Age II and Grand Theft Auto V). But it's nice to see that Kotaku and TB (at least) are apparently not going to follow post-release NDAs anymore.

 

[Grumman]

It's not just possible, it's trivially easy. All you need to do is make the program increment a counter each time it renders a character, and stop rendering characters once it hits a cap or once it runs out of characters, whichever happens first. If there are a thousand people within LOS, just render the closest 200 and stop there. If there are 5, since 5 < 200, render them no matter how far away they are.

If you think this is not possible, you clearly have not the slightest clue about programming.

If it's so trivially easy, then you should be able to name 5 games that use tech like this, can't you?

*sigh*

The entire point of using such a technique is to ensure your optimisation methods are hidden from the end user while remaining efficient. Low draw distance fails to hide its corner-cutting, which is why it is possible to point to a game and say "Yes, that one uses low draw distance to reduce the amount of rendering it needs to do". An end user should not be capable of pointing at your game and saying "See? They're cutting corners there!" because if they can see it to complain about it, you aren't doing your job right.

 

[silverleaf81]

Great, they did a Battlefield 4. And Ubisoft will probably never fully fix the game either, they'd have long moved on to the sequel. And their engines seem to keep getting worse and worse, while also having higher requierments than before. What a mess.

I remember recently of an article that accused them of being the new EA, and I find it difficult to disagree.

 

[Something Amyss]

I remember recently of an article that accused them of being the new EA, and I find it difficult to disagree.

If Ubisoft thinks they can take the title without a fight, they'd better watch themselves.

 

[Buizel91]

At least they are trying to fix it, and aware there is a problem, for such a huge game there is bound to be a fuckton of problems.

No excuse mind, a month later and there probably wouldn't be as many problems. They probably got big headed after the success of Black Flag. Ooh well live and learn.

Probably pick this up after christmas.

 

[ryukage_sama]

Oh, God. Some of those images from the Steam Community page made me think of Mr. Popo.

Spoiler

Edit:
And the internet delivers.

 

[Jadak]

Now, this is where I actually have an issue with the whole 'frame rate' topic.

Unlike what seems to be a popular opinion, I am entirely okay with 30 fps being all that is desired for a game. However, when you make 30 fps a target, to the point that it actually can't go higher, then you get a development process that that makes 30fps a goal.

And while I'm okay with 30fps in the game, 30fps as the height of your performance goals is shit.

So sure, 30fps is fine for a game, but testing isn't perfect, performance is never consistent, and frame rate always suffers. If it suffers when you came was optimized with 60fps as a goal, no biggie, it drops to 30 or so and it's just fine.

But, if performance in your game hits a snag when it was only intended to reach 30 fps to begin with? Well, this happens, it's fucked.

Really, regardless of the frame rate your game will actually run at, you should design intending to at least handle 60. If you choose to throttle it down to 30 after the fact to ensure a stable and consistent experience, go for it, but if you aim for 30 and shit doesn't keep up? Now your game just sucks.

 

[J Tyran]

If a dynamic render distance is so trivially easy to program, then name 5 games that use it.

You know there are mods for Skyrim that patch that into the game? Yes mods made by the players, they also work much better than a team full of supposedly triple A developers can manage.

 

[Jandau]

Could it be that trying to put out yearly sequels leaves developers with too little time to... you know.. DEVELOP the game? Why not take 2-3 years to properly develop a title, polish the design, make sure the mechanics are working well, maybe add in new features and expand on existing ones, optimize the software for all the platforms and thereby get the best performance out of the hardware available?

Oh yes, because charging $60 once every two years is half as much money as charging $60 every year...

 

[Czann]

Another day, another Ubisoft trainwreck.