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Ubisoft Claims CPU Specs a Limiting Factor In Assassin's Creed Unity On Consoles
MojoKid (1002251) writes A new interview with Assassin's Creed Unity senior producer Vincent Pontbriand has some gamers seeing red and others crying "told you so," after the developer revealed that the game's 900p framerate and 30 fps target on consoles is a result of weak CPU performance rather than GPU compute. "Technically we're CPU-bound," Pontbriand said. "The GPUs are really powerful, obviously the graphics look pretty good, but it's the CPU that has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen, all these systems running in parallel. We were quickly bottlenecked by that and it was a bit frustrating, because we thought that this was going to be a tenfold improvement over everything AI-wise..." This has been read by many as a rather damning referendum on the capabilities of AMD's APU that's under the hood of Sony's and Microsoft's new consoles. To some extent, that's justified; the Jaguar CPU inside both the Sony PS4 and Xbox One is a modest chip with a relatively low clock speed. Both consoles may offer eight CPU threads on paper, but games can't access all that headroom. One thread is reserved for the OS and a few more cores will be used for processing the 3D pipeline. Between the two, Ubisoft may have only had 4-5 cores for AI and other calculations — scarcely more than last gen, and the Xbox 360 and PS3 CPUs were clocked much faster than the 1.6 / 1.73GHz frequencies of their replacements.
can we please stop pretending clockspeed has anything to do with performance?
as has been said a million times
CLOCKSPEED IS ONLY FOR MEASURING APPLES WITH APPLES.
different CPU generations are INCOMPARABLE using clock speed.
so for instance a sandy bridge at 2.0 ghz is slower than a haswell at 2.0ghz, even with the same ghz number.
Benchmarking is the only way.
Boo fricking hoo. Learn to develop a game with what you have and quit yer bitching.
The best damn video game console ever was 8 bits, ran on a single core (usually), at 1.79 MHz IIRC. Gamers then logged just as many hours saving princesses, shooting aliens, and stacking blocks as what gamers do today. And guess what...they loved it. They fucking ate it up and went back for seconds and thirds. No, it wasn't photo-realistic 3D video with dolby-i-don't-give-a-crap sound and 87 button LCD-screen force feedback controllers. We didn't need it because we could have fun with what we had and didn't worry about frame rates or pixel resolutions or how many cores a OS management thread ran on vs graphics cores vs whatever.
Game designers these days, spoiled rotten little twerps that whine about everything.
Maybe you didn't target your game properly.
I think what Ubisoft is trying to say here is that it's programmers are shit, and so is it's game engine (AnvilNext). Other publishers manage to do okay, but poor old Ubisoft are stuck with this turd and can't just switch to Unreal or something more competent, so sorry guys you only get 900p on consoles.
I mean, obviously if you are CPU bound the solution is to reduce the load on the GPU by making the game render at 900p. The problem is the AI for the large number of characters in the game, so clearly reducing the pixel count will help with that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's probably not the AI calculations related to gameplay, but Ubisoft's AI calculations related to their DRM that get highest priority in their games ...
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there