Slashdot Mirror
Ubisoft Points Finger At AMD For Assassin's Creed Unity Poor Performance
MojoKid (1002251) writes "Life is hard when you're a AAA publisher. Last month, Ubisoft blamed weak console hardware for the troubles it had bringing Assassin's Creed Unity up to speed, claiming that it could've hit 100 FPS but for weak console CPUs. Now, in the wake of the game's disastrous launch, the company has changed tactics — suddenly, all of this is AMD's fault. An official company forum post currently reads: "We are aware that the graphics performance of Assassin's Creed Unity on PC may be adversely affected by certain AMD CPU and GPU configurations. This should not affect the vast majority of PC players, but rest assured that AMD and Ubisoft are continuing to work together closely to resolve the issue, and will provide more information as soon as it is available." There are multiple problems with this assessment. First, there's no equivalent Nvidia-centric post on the main forum, and no mention of the fact that if you own an Nvidia card of any vintage but a GTX 970 or 980, you're going to see less-than ideal performance. According to sources, the problem with Assassin's Creed Unity is that the game is issuing tens of thousands of draw calls — up to 50,000 and beyond, in some cases. This is precisely the kind of operation that Mantle and DirectX 12 are designed to handle, but DirectX 11, even 11.2, isn't capable of efficiently processing that many calls at once. It's a fundamental limit of the API and it kicks in harshly in ways that adding more CPU cores simply can't help with.
Intel inside you !!
http://games.slashdot.org/comm...
So let's give Ubisoft the benefit of the doubt for a moment. I'm not going to slate them for the fact that you need a top-end graphics card to get good performance with all the bells and whistles. I actually quite like to see developers showing a bit of ambition when it comes to pushing the envelope on PC graphics. Let's even assume that something went badly wrong in the AMD optimisation. It's not completely unknown for things to go wrong with a GPU manufacturer at the last moment - the PC version of Rage was a hideous mess on PCs with Nvidia cards when it released, because a driver update that was anticipated between the game going golden-master and hitting the shelves turned out not to be what the developer was expecting.
But even allowing for that, how does it explain the console versions being such a mess? There are detailed performance analysis reports out there showing frankly shocking levels of performance on both of the console platforms (Playstation 4 and Xbox One - no last-gen releases for this game). Both platforms fail to hold even a consistent 30 fps, with the Playstation 4 version (which in theory should be the better of the two, as the console does have a little bit more horsepower) having some truly shocking moments where the framerate dips into the teens.
If you're used to playing games on a PC, this might not sound too shocking. After all, unless you have a particularly old PC, you can almost always salvage a playable framerate by dropping your graphics quality. But that option isn't there on a console. For action oriented games on a console, a locked 60 fps rate is the "gold standard" and is becoming almost mandatory for twitch-shooters, precision driving games and other genres that rely on rapid response times. The popularity of the Call of Duty series, generally inexplicable to PC gamers, has largely been driven by the fact that the series has long adhered to the 60 fps standard on the consoles, meaning that it has felt tighter and more precise than its competitors.
But if you can't manage a locked 60 framerate, then the general consensus is that a locked 30 framerate is an acceptable fallback. It won't feel as precise, but it at least eliminates the disconcerting impact of framerate fluctuations (particularly unpleasant when you're playing on a controller). For a console action-game to fail to manage even a locked 30 fps is pretty shocking these days. For it to be dipping into the teens suggests either misguided design choices or terrible optimisation (or both).
Plus, yeah, the whole "falling through the floor" thing is happening on consoles as well as PC. The game's broken and it's not (entirely or chiefly) down to a particular brand of graphics card.
How is it now obvious to them that this excuse mean nothing after release?
Are they implying they never tested their game on the platforms they specified in the minimum requirements?
Cheat your customers, cover it up by suppressing reviews, and then lie about whose fault it is. Has nothing to do with properly testing your product and releasing quality software.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Just... wow.
I was sure it's piracy, and they will install a new version of StarForce.
TBH, if you go near an EA or Ubisoft product, you deserve what you get. They're not even worth pirating.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
the linked comment is super cool, but unsourced. However, it has a ring of truth for me. the comment calls out several nvidia technologies like TXAA and SMAA. It was the second time today I heard those terms. The first was when watching a gamestop video where an designer talks about all the cool tech that makes far cry 4 so pretty on the compuper. "Together with NVIDIA, Ubisoft has been working to incorporate GAMEWORKS technologies to add visual enhancements for the PC version of the game." LINK
since before launch they complained that there's not enough cpu for the "AI".
though looking at the videos, from previous game they just changed generateCivilians(10) to generateCivilians(200) for no particular reason. loads of people on the scenes but it doesn't look good, just looks weird
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Here's something that doesn't need 'conspiracy' to understand. Unity is playing bad on the PC because they're issuing 50k draw calls on DX11.
Ironically, instead of blaming AMD for this, AMD is actually providing a solution. I don't like it personally, but the Mantle API specifically solves this problem today while we wait for DX12/OpenGL Next.
Of course, it's only available on AMD hardware and besides, because Ubi is in a company wide PR deal with nVidia to use GameWorks(TM) THEY CAN'T USE IT!
So instead of blaming AMD, Ubi should either go sit in a corner (because they know what they did wrong), or they need to look into a mirror (because they don't recognize that they're the real problem)
Belief is the currency of delusion.
One draw call, glMultiDrawElementsIndirectCountARB(), per shader program (you can even avoid that by using shader subroutines so you're then doing one draw call per render pass).
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
That must be the reason the game runs like utter crap on PC as well. Ohh wait, it is not!
TotalBiscuit - "Let's not play Assassins Creed: Unity yet "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
They knew they had a shit game before the release.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
As far as I know AMD's Mantle is freeware and isn't limited to AMD hardware. It could be adopted by nVidia if they wanted to, but their stance so far is that there would be no benefit using Mantle.
So yeah, I don't see a point in blaming AMD here.
"rest assured that AMD and Ubisoft are continuing to work together closely" That does not fly if you simply blame the other party. If you were aware of the problem you should have scaled down the graphics of that version. This is such a bullshit excuse.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
Surely releasing buggy shit hurts more in the long run than releasing a bit late?
Before its time? Sort of like the developer pushed some techniques that ended up being unfeasable on modern hardware, needing every ounce of performance they could muster, just to make it playable.
Honestly This looks like the case of a game that was not even capable of running well on todays hardware, it will be next generation and generation after that when the game runs fine. By history PC games suffered from this problem, you would buy a game which would perform poorly on most hardware only for it to suddenly run like butter on a system bought years later, meaning frame rate dips and all that were entirely normal but would be fixed when hardware upgrades were achieved.
The comments about mantle and shit, damn right if they wanted to build a beastly game they could have used every method possible to get extra performance out of today's stuff. But to be fair mantle only removes some of the overhead from using the DirectX API, moving it closer to the metal which can reduce CPU and GPU cycles for the same operation but isn't necessarily going to solve the problem if this game needs future hardware with vastly higher amounts of compute power.
Why is Ubisoft blaming AMD here? Most likely, because AMD CPUs are not as fast as Intel ones, and you can gain some performance by using Intel. But Intel also costs more, so blaming this on AMD doesn't seem fair, it's Ubisoft's fault for pushing the hardware to it's limits. I think Ubisoft is putting blame where it is not warranted, because overall, this sounds like a beast of a game that simply requires waiting a year ot two to play to avoid the performance hickups of today's hardware. The console versions obviously could have been scaled waaay back, and they would run without a hitch. Its a design choice Ubisoft's developers made to do what they did, ultimately, knowing they were going to be limited by the Xbox One and PS4 and PC hardwares performance.
obamasweapon.com.
While I'm not happy at nVidia's behaviour, and, make no mistake, AMD engages in the same game, it was Ubisoft's choice. Of course, Ubisoft are only too happy to screw over their customers for a buck. Look at the money they took from GAME to remove their customers choice to buy from online stores like Steam. Ubisoft could have made a game that runs well on either nVidia or AMD hardware. Instead they knew it would run badly, or, at the very least, the publisher did, otherwise why the embargo on game reviews? Did Ubisoft fail to test their game on AMD hardware? Yes or no, it puts Ubisoft in a bad light. So after they've made a buggy game, with performance issues, including some specifically related to AMD, they start blaming AMD? And the "weak" hardware in game consoles. It didn't stop them developing for that hardware. If it doesn't then run well, then it's Ubisoft that are at fault. Although, this does depend somewhat on the publisher not applying pressure to release the game, regardless of state, before the holiday season.
I suspect that Mantle would run a lot better on the AMD hardware though. DirectX 12 will end up with the most support.
Who ordered that?
their stance so far is that there would be no benefit using Mantle
The article points out a contradiction that isn't, there is no point in supporting Mantle when all relevant low level features will be accessible using the next versions of already existing APIs (OpenGL/DirectX). That the mantle specification is under AMD control makes support for Mantle a gigantic risk with no gain.
Use less draw calls?
Modern GPUs can do nice things like texture libraries and very configurable shaders as the if statements aren't the pain they used to be on 360/PS3.
For the record, SMAA isn't NVIDIA tech.
Google SMAA, download the source code.
Yes, the game has plenty of bugs, and those can get frustrating when you hide behind rather than climb a wall because the commands are the same. But it is also true that with Direct X 11 (Windows 7) and the GeForce 780 on a 6 core Intel i7 (3.3 GHz) the frame rates are very playable and the game is beautiful to look at, and fun to play. Yes, it has pretty steep system requirements, but they should be able to fix a lot of the problems for less robust hardware with patches and lowered NPC counts. Ubisoft should have delayed the game a few weeks while they finished patching some of the issues, but then they would have been criticized for not meeting their release date.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Err, TXAA is REYES style anti-aliasing - it's so close to what's been almost industry standard in the movie industry for decades.
I don't think you can call it an nvidia 'technology', you 'could' go as far as saying nVidia's super-scalar CPU designs are well suited to it though - but you can't blame nVidia for having a more flexible stream computing technology than AMD (who favour VLIW style for slightly better performance at the cost of flexibility, as in this case)
The problem (or solution rather) is that developers don't want to write the same game 7 times. OpenGL(Linux/Mac OS X/PS3), DirectX9(PC baseline), DirectX12(PC high end), Mantle(PS4), Metal(OS X/iOS8),OpenGL ES2(Android, old iOS),OpenGL ES3(iOS)
They will simply design a middleware that can "intelligently" pick a rendering backend, and if the game suffers, it suffers because of the weakest backends (DirectX9, OpenGL ES2) force it to. This is a problem with Unity (the 3D game engine), and is a problem with Unreal engine.
Oddly enough the Crytek engine actually works better on AMD hardware (and Crytek games are often bundled) because the games support higher DirectX levels out of the box.
But no single-player game engine will ever work for a MMO game, due to the need of many objects in motion at once. The same Crytek engine used for a MMO looks a lot like a 6 year old game. This is because they trade off detail for simultaneous objects because of the need to limit draw calls.
I wonder if the NSA let them use theirs?
Ubisoft==Do Not Buy.
I only got FarCry3 because it came with a video card for free; talk about a game for damaged psychopaths... Sorry, I meant "Written By".
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
In the related news, Nvidia sees no benefit of supporting DirectX 12.
every year they will get worse till the next gen comes out
haha console idiots
we pc gamers will continue to upgrade and move on...
so the fact that a system with an i7 and a 970gtx will also suck with this game has no bearing at all on this statement?
>and no mention of the fact that if you own an Nvidia card of any vintage but a GTX 970 or 980, you're going to see less-than ideal performance.
That is because even on (triple) sli'ed GTX 980's you will not get a decent performance. Gaming reviewer/personality TotalBiscuit has gotten terrible performance (dropping below 20 fps at times, full of glitches, crashes) on a new rig with two GTX 980's. In his video he also mentions asking a friend of his with three gtx 980's if he was experiencing the same issues and he was. How do you even manage to mess up that badly?
Their stance is completely bogus. Let's take a look at DICE's experience adding a Mantle renderer for Battlefield 4, presented at the AMD & Microsoft Developer Day conference here in Stockholm this past June: http://amd-dev.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/Rendering-Battlefield-4-with-Mantle-Yuriy-ODonnell.ppsx
The numbers don't lie. For those who don't want to download a PowerPoint viewer, I'll give the money shot:
Benchmarking machine: Core i7-390x, AMD Radeon R9 290x, running at 1080p with Ultra graphics settings
DX11 renderer: Minimum frame rate 42fps, average frame rate 78fps
Mantle renderer: Minimum frame rate 94fps, average frame rate 120fps
The only thing I get out of NVidia not wanting to make use of the Mantle API is a pathological case of Not Invented Here syndrome, combined with a long-term gamble of DirectX 12 providing a cross-vendor implementation of an API similar to Mantle. For those wanting to learn more about DX12, there's a presentation from the same conference here: http://amd-dev.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/Introduction-To-DX12-Ivan-Nevraev.ppsx
In general it seems to provide the same sort of benefits as Mantle, in that it removes a lot of legacy cruft from the pipeline and puts the onus of redundant state checking and resource management on the application authors. This shouldn't be a major problem in and of itself, as one of the things mentioned during the talk was that a lot of engines already do these things, so the kernel-mode driver doing the same checks is simply extra work. I can't blame NVidia for holding out for DX12 given that it will provide a similar bare-metal interface as Mantle, while having support across IHVs, but to say that there's no benefit to using Mantle - and by extension, a bare-metal GPU interface in general - is patently ridiculous given the performance improvements that companies using Mantle have seen.
"AAA" in this context is read as "Triple A", and as such "an" is incompatible.
don't blame someone else for your inability to properly optimize and code your game and animations, and to adequately test the end product *before* public launch.
As far as I know AMD's Mantle is freeware and isn't limited to AMD hardware. It could be adopted by nVidia if they wanted to, but their stance so far is that there would be no benefit using Mantle.
So yeah, I don't see a point in blaming AMD here.
At the moment, Mantle definitely is limited to AMD hardware, and there are only promises that at some unspecified time it will be opened. Intel tried to get Mantle documentation from AMD to be able to evaluate if its worth implementing, but they could not get it even under an NDA.
Nvidia's position is entirely understandable, as Mantle becoming a de facto standard would put them at a major disadvantage, given that AMD developers would internally always have earlier access to any updated versions of Mantle, and the API can also be designed and evolved around future AMD hardware.
If AMD's Direct3D and especially OpenGL drivers are worse than that of the competition, they are also definitely to be blamed, since the availability of the specs is the same for everyone.
Writeup doesn't make sense. The problem is supposedly a fundamental limit in Direct3D 11.2, which would be unable to handle the large nunber of draw calls. Yet the Nvidia 970 and 980 are claimed to offer great ('ideal') performance. Using D3D 11.2. Wut?
Maybe AMD should spend more time optimizing their D3D path rather than spending their limited development resources on the Mantle detour that benefits noone but their own hardware.
Do you do it?
It looks correct to me. You want a A A A publisher?
... An official company forum post currently reads: "We are aware that the graphics performance of Assassin's Creed Unity on PC may be adversely affected by certain AMD CPU and GPU configurations...
It sounds to me like Ubisoft is not using the hardware properly, and is trying to place the blame elsewhere.
Who cares, you all will pre-order their games anyway so stop whining
Funny, I have been running Unity on all AMD (med specs): Phenom II x4 940, 6GB ram, R9 270. This runs at a stable 20FPS. Because of this, I would like to point out that Ubi really doesn't seem to know what they are saying.. Their min specs reqs aren't even accurate!
Sounds more like Ubisoft has poor development and especially TESTING practices to put out something like that.
...AMD does suck. Only thing that have going for them are ATI video cards...
I am really struggling to understand how they could be using 50k drawcalls! Are they just not using any batching at all? Granted most of my work is mobile and unoptimized and unbatched my peak is 200, down to 10-20 on release. What am I missing?
The problem (or solution rather) is that developers don't want to write the same game 7 times. OpenGL(Linux/Mac OS X/PS3), DirectX9(PC baseline), DirectX12(PC high end), Mantle(PS4), Metal(OS X/iOS8),OpenGL ES2(Android, old iOS),OpenGL ES3(iOS)
They will simply design a middleware that can "intelligently" pick a rendering backend, and if the game suffers, it suffers because of the weakest backends (DirectX9, OpenGL ES2) force it to. This is a problem with Unity (the 3D game engine), and is a problem with Unreal engine.
Oddly enough the Crytek engine actually works better on AMD hardware (and Crytek games are often bundled) because the games support higher DirectX levels out of the box.
But no single-player game engine will ever work for a MMO game, due to the need of many objects in motion at once. The same Crytek engine used for a MMO looks a lot like a 6 year old game. This is because they trade off detail for simultaneous objects because of the need to limit draw calls.
Right, but just a couple months ago these guys were talking up their new game and how they were trading high FPS off in favor of high object/poly counts. I believe they were especially pleased with themselves about how many unique actors they could get into the crowds.
So it seems to be a bit of a self-made problem; over-driving your target hardware OR API is a programming problem- target better hardware or use a different API, but stop blaming other people for sucking
I imagine Ubisoft's shareholders care.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
That's patently false. TotalBiscuit just tried to make a "WTF is Ass. Creed Unity" and flat out states that the game's performance is simply too poor for him to work with. He runs a dual 980 setup and consulted with someone who runs a triple 980 setup (or so he says) and the results were similarly poor.
At this point ubisoft are pointing fingers at everyone in a desperate attempt to shift blame from themselves.
AMD abandoned it's VLIW architecture almost 4 years ago. The last product without GCN was the 6900 series.
DX12 will be irrelevant for years if Microsoft don't release it for Wiindows 7.
There is no public mantle API, only select publishers have access to it. So I assume that you won't see anyone but AMD make it work on their cards until that happens.
The problem is they didn't take time to optimize their code. 50k draw calls! WTF!
Write bad code and then blame the hardware for not compensating.
If you know that your game won't work on the given hardware then why set your expectations that it will?
This is the case of management won't listen to the developers. Or more like senior developers won't accept 'it doesn't work' from those actually doing the work.
Basically, the team programming it didn't test it on anything except the latest and greatest? Even though they claim to support older hardware?
Fuck them. They deserve every bit of negative press they are getting.
Everybody's complaining about Assassin's Creed... and I'm just here playing Mario Kart 8 at 1080p/60fps on my "inferior" game console.
How about some QA before releasing the game Ubisoft? Maybe you'd have noticed this before release?
ArsTechnica article, with cool buggy zombie pic... http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...
Crysis, meet Assassin's Creed Unity. Assassin's Creed Unity, Crysis.
OK, now seriously: The problem is the users, they are holding the console wrong.
nVIDIA doesn't provide SMAA. SMAA and FXAA implementations are freely available to developers and might be injected into some of existing games from outside. They're basically extremely low-cost approximation to real AA and good enough for many applications.
The blame nVIDIA doesn't make sense. Since AMD has stopped evolving their CPU and GPU for some time (several years on CPU and at least 2 years on GPU). They have nothing even to remotely match the Maxwell chips for its high-performance/low-power-consumption ratio. All they have now are very old designs, combining more cores and requiring several times of power.
That's why you don't see AMD chips on laptop anymore. Soon they'll be out of PC market too.
Does the set of "select publishers" include all publishers that regularly produce games with the level of graphical detail that justifies Mantle's claimed benefits over OpenGL? Or is AMD playing kingmaker with the publishers allowed to have it?
Draw calls are more about drawing too much unique geometry/textures. Not necessarily bad code.
There's enough in that comment that is verifiable bullshit that it makes me question the parts of it that don't seem ridiculous at first glance.
Which is a much simpler solution. Customers blindly buying games without waiting for reviews are to blame.
... of the PC & PS4 frame rate drops.
AC: Unity's Frame Rate Issues Resolved By This Embarrassingly Simple Fix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It seems to me AMD is as common in laptops as they have ever been. Not very.
Except that Nvidia users are reporting all the same problems. Crashes, clipping issues, massive fps drops in certain buildings. All the nine miles.
I've even seen reports that even tri-SLI 980s cannot handle the game on 1080p ultra with no AA at stable 60 fps. This is pretty much as powerful of a machine as you can get today. And the game definitely doesn't look good enough to justify that kind of power not being enough.
This is Ubisoft's shitty optimization dropping the ball.
The writeup makes sense, but I think you misread it. It says that NVidia cards experience the exact same problem that AMD cards do, namely that you need ridiculously high-end card that alone costs more than most gamers would spend on their entire PCs just to get it to run decently. "Less-than-ideal" is a euphemism for "utterly atrocious". In fact, the writeup is being generous toward NVidia, because a even pair of SLI'd 980s will struggle with the game.
And we all know that movie style AA (post process, non-real-time) is a GREAT algorithm to adopt for games (hard real time requirements, at least on a human scale.)
Please go die in a fire and take your shilling with you.
I'm more of the opinion that they're incompetent since they decided that creating a female model was too difficult.
Yeah, my question would be: WHAT DID YOU F'ING TEST THEM ON
It's not like consoles differ in graphics hardware for a given model. Sure, a certain PS4 or XBone might have varying drive sizes, but the video hardware is standard, that's why they're consoles and not PC's. So any blaming it on the "graphics vendor" is moot, because they had the same f***ing hardware as the users who are experiencing issues.
To me, that screams one of two things (or both):
a) A really shyte QA process
or
b) They ignored a bunch of known issues and decided to ship the thing anyways. Because, money.
Sorry, Ubi, but you can't blame this on the graphics card. If it shows up now, it should have showed up during testing. It's your job to make sure that the game runs properly on the existing hardware, not the other way around.
Not, for the PC market, maybe that argument might hold water a bit, but we come back to the same issue. DX11 is a standard (I prefer GL myself by whatever), if the bottleneck is at the number of draws calls limited by the graphics API, then it is NOT a hardware issue. So, you didn't test the game on standard configurations with the two major graphics card vendors? Sorry, not their fault. AMD may be pitching in to help now but I doubt it's because their cards are the issue.
can your machine play the new AC? haha
not sure what scene that was, but the different was never THAT big that i saw in benchmarks.... citations: 1, 2, 3, 4
You haven't seen the A-series chips have you? AMD is very common on laptops now because the A series has a far better performance/watt than an intel CPU + nvidia GPU
...Ubisoft spent as much time and money on testing as they do on DRM they would be less of a joke.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
Well thanks for owning up to the fact that it's all AMD's fault!
Given that fact, there is absolutely no reason for me to buy Far Cry 4 next week since my console and PC both use AMD processors.
As the problem is AMD's fault, I guess Far Cry 4 is going to be just as buggy.
$60 saved. Thanks again!
Why is OpenGL ES3 left off of Android and BlackBerry? Both support it since last year (BB10 and Android 4.3)
Whoops.... 720p 59fps.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-vs-mario-kart-8
No need for the quotes. We know the hardware is inferior. The WiiU is to the PS3 what the PS4 is to the Xbone. Slightly faster, but the same gen.
Over the last 10 years, we've allowed this to happen, we are mostly at fault.
We buy into products that are less and less quality. Then, we accept that low quality product as "its ok there will be patches". For anyone who purchased this game, i'd suggest you send it back and get a refund. Buy yourself Quake 3 or Elite:Frontier and admire what is possible when the developers care about the product their making.
Fair play to Ubisoft for taking the next step in blaming others for their failures.
This has nothing to do with AMD or DX11 draw calls its just bullcrap to confuse the inexperienced. AMD and Nvidia cards are DX11 certified, their cards comply with the DX11 api. Its down to Ubisoft to know the limitations of whats possible and optimize the game accordingly. Their probably using their own inhouse game engine for this game, so there is no excuse.
This game is a complete failure at all levels of development. Profits are the clear priority here, not the end product. Send the product back for a refund and make Ubisoft realise we wont accept half completed alpha crap for our hard earned money.
The problem (or solution rather) is that developers don't want to write the same game 7 times.
As a business apps dev, it seems obvious that the correct number of different versions is dependent on client considerations and not on the desires of the programmer. If the client has 7 platforms, I might need 7 versions. In this case, the platforms are actually being chosen by the vendor, and so they can't complain about how many platforms they have.
It is funny because they make more money and have higher margins, so they should be more able to manage that. Plus, they choose what platforms their game targets and what the listed requirements are, so they can totally control this themselves. Wish I could do that!
It looks almost like the developers just didn't finish the product, and didn't even have time to "port" the main effort from the highest end machines to all the machines listed as targets. This has got to be some serious PHB horse-pucky right here, "ship it anyways, we can just patch it later."
their stance so far is that there would be no benefit using Mantle
The article points out a contradiction that isn't, there is no point in supporting Mantle when all relevant low level features will be accessible using the next versions of already existing APIs (OpenGL/DirectX). That the mantle specification is under AMD control makes support for Mantle a gigantic risk with no gain.
So you'd have them wait until the average consumer has the "next versions" of APIs. OK. You should be advised that each new numbered "version" of those APIs are actually new things that typically require new hardware. This isn't a matter of waiting for people to update their drivers, you're talking about waiting until consumers have all bought new PCs. I don't see that helping their shipping schedule.
If they're shipping now, it should probably run well on current computers people already own. Golly gee.
At least we Americans can pronounce an "h" without being born in a castle.
I love my A-series! I don't have to buy an overheated energy pig PC just to be able to do 3D editing and development using current APIs. And, Tuxracer never looked better.
Running a 3d game my CPU fan spins loudly, but running business apps it slows down to the lowest speed, I can't even hear it.
Obviously, it is a low to mid priced CPU, and considering the GPU, it is very low cost. And yet, it is much faster in every area that a similarly priced CPU+GPU from anybody else. It wins all the way from low end, "I do want 3d sometimes but I don't want to pay extra" up to "I want something pretty good at both, but I don't want to buy an overpriced `gaming' machine." Also if you don't use 3d at all, then you can get a slightly faster CPU for the same money.
For most tasks it stays close to idle and uses almost no power.
Just like DX10/11 will be irrelevant if Microsoft doesn't release it for Windows XP.
Having to install several app stores on a single machine isn't quite as bad as being limited to the operating system publisher's app store, where the operating system publisher gets veto power over what games you can play on a machine under any (lawful) circumstances. This is the case for iOS, Windows RT, and major game consoles.
actually a new version of directx is the ONLY reason to change a windows that is working fine, unless its no longer supported like xp or something like that. Also it has to be a new version that does something, not like directx 10
so if directx 12 does something and is any good, i would change to a windows desktop with every icon shaped like a penis and steve jobs face as mandatory wallpaper, i dont even care. I would even use 8.0 metro syle desktop if that thing gave me 30 more frames
When Steam came out, it had two major problems. One is that in the dial-up era, a lot of machines used for single-player gaming were never connected to the Internet at all. They didn't even have a modem. Though Windows could be activated over the telephone, Steam required an Internet activation. The other is that early versions of the Steam client had a habit of losing the cached receipt file used to authorize offline play. In order to ensure that this didn't happen, you had to be online while choosing "Go Offline". Local Internet outage? Too bad. Traveling? Too bad. Deployed? Too bad. Public library doesn't allow bringing in desktop PCs from home? Too bad.
They are sort of irrelevant for the average gamer. DX9 is incredibly popular because it's available. Maybe the high end games with expensive systems don't see it that way, but for people on a sub-$500 computer either they don't see a performance improvement with higher versions or it hurts their performance.
I only have one PC game with mantle support, and it made performance worse. FPS slightly higher but with stuttering. Maybe on a high end system it does better, but on a high end system where your fps is over 50 then it won't matter anyway.
Now, that extension will be ratified for July 2013
So where does that leave people with a GPU more than 16 months old at the time a game is released? I'm still waiting for OpenGL 2.0 drivers on the laptop that I'm typing this comment on. Do laptop makers even provide for user-installable replacement GPUs?
the entire company knew Unity wasn't ready.
Which company? Ubisoft, or Canonical three years ago?
I jest, but why do we have to have a game called Unity, a 3D engine called Unity, and an X11 desktop environment called Unity?
So how would one go about making and installing course mods and the like for Mario Kart 8? Other games in the Assassin's Creed series have mods.
Your sub $500 computer--if you build it yourself is more powerful than the consoles out on the market today and can use DX11 implementations without a problem. The DX9 market you're talking about are the bottom-basement machines that have a $40 videocard in them.
Om, nomnomnom...
Well, since an "object" is just a list of primitives from the GPUs point of view, you could use a single object that renders into multiple physically separate triangle meshes, and use a texture lookup in the vertex shader to get their individual transform matrixes. Then just update the texture to move the meshes. That way you could, in theory, draw all objects (or really triangles) that use the same shader with a single draw command.
Obviously, this makes it harder to make objects appear or disappear, but sending vertices of unused "slots" to somewhere near infinity and breaking the primitive list into reasonable separately-rendered chunks, combined with a dedicated allocator, should reach a reasonable balance.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
XKCD 606
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Combined with what level of development the software libraries required to implement it have had.
Where's Carmack when you need him? You're supposed to keep all that shit down and batch it, not flaunt it like an narcisstic 'bigger is better' number.
I think it mostly started around '08, anything steam or online activation was shelved unless there was a known working crack and the game wasn't primarily multiplay oriented. The last game I bought was X3TC, with plans to buy Rebirth/Albion Prelude (which got shelved when I found out it required steam and wasn't available on local store shelves. Turned out to not have been a major loss.) Bioware has been going on longer. I started boycotting them after their linux support never improved for NWN and they dropped any semblance of support with their later games. (They only ended up providing half-assed linux support because there were rumblings of a class action lawsuit since they lied right up until release that they would have a linux client out within a few weeks, many people, myself included, buying it on release day only to find out it was a year away with neithrer toolkit (the most important part) nor movies available when finally released.
Since then I've either played f2p mmos, or skimmed online-only distribution sites and scoffed at the prices. Even games I've owned for 10 years on ACTUAL MEDIA, some of which came with manuals or other cool packaging, cost as much or more via online distribution. While some of the GOG stuff is at least 'value added', most of it just feels like a scam, especially when you look at how much of the money is going to publishers and not to the long-since disbanded development studios responsible for actually producing the games.
At the end of the day, nothing was lost. Except one of the older crowd of gamers who are no longer relevant to the commercial landscape.
Are you kidding? They couldn't even figure out how to get female characters to work.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They tried it but their fucked up drm prevented them from running the game.
It's not like anything over 50 fps is equally amazingly awesome. 50fps is just ok. Getting 100fps instead of 50 fps is a vast improvement.
Also, you're experience is just 1 sample. Maybe that one game you have didn't do a good job of using the Mantle API.
"Unity is playing bad on the PC because they're issuing 50k draw calls on DX11."
yeah well robbing the game addicted of their hard earned money isn't easy when DX12 is not on windows7 but is on windows 8.1 . microsoft is the only winner out of this scene.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
That still happens to me from time to time. My current workaround is if I know I'm going to be away from an internet connection for awhile, I put my laptop into sleep mode with steam running in offline mode, and it retains its state upon laptop wake up. I also try to keep a bunch of the games in my steam library that I know will run from executable without steam just in case I need to do a reboot.
Origin seems a little better about this, at least in regards to the client, but can lose them for individual games, as I found out on my last trip. I only have a handful of games in Origin, so it wasn't a huge deal. Only reason I even have it installed in the first place is that I accidentally killed my installed steam library trying to troubleshoot why steam wasn't connecting once I got to a temporary internet connection on another trip. The error message given with steam installed gave me the impression something in my steam install had corrupted, reinstalled it as a troubleshooting measure (figuring I had a fast enough connection to re-download a few small indie games and at least one or two of the larger AAA ones) and got a better error message essentially informing me that steam was blocked on the connection I was using. Bought a couple discounted Origin games, installed them, authenticated with a slow mobile connection and was good for the rest of that trip.
I travel for work frequently, so this has become a major issue for me. Not everywhere I go has reliable wifi access, and in some cases the access I can get restricts things like gaming (probably amongst other things). While I still have my 3DS, some days the best way to kill time is a game of Civ. One good thing is it has at least motivated me to pursue more productive hobbies such as coding.
Star citizen
Can you please provide this link when you talk about SMAA being freely available? More developers need to know about this.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
i feel steam is horrible in this regard.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
On laptops, where? I don't seen them on Clevo (high, mid, thin models), Dell Alienware or MSI gaming laptops, or any ultrabooks. Not since last year. They were there, but not anymore.
AMD A10 manufacturing still uses 28 nm while the rest of Intel CPUs have 22 nm and going to change to 14 nm next year.
The performance/power from their best CPU, A10-7850K is 6.92 pt/W, compared to i7 i4770K's 12.9 pt/W on cpuboss. And their single-core performance couldn't even match i5.
On GPU side they offered better cost/power/performance until nVIDIA puts Maxwell into new laptops this year and desktops next year. They currently don't have anything to match 860M/970M/980M on mobile or 750/970/980 on desktop, and no plan of next generation GPUs we can see so far. NO PLAN.
For most tasks it stays close to idle and uses almost no power.
You do realize that's just fine-grained throttling? When I mean double performance/power, I mean it could run at full speed while generating 50% of heat and consuming 50% of power compared to previous generations. That's critical to laptops and small form computers unless you just want a fancy cripple which have great specs but overheat and die whenever you do real work.
True, since the PC's realistic lifetime in gaming use is 5-7 years, it takes a long time until Windows7 is phased out. Thanks to static and slow HW on the consoles, the PC games realy do not need so much of power anymore, hence there is no need to upgrade them. My previous PC turned to seven years old until it met a game that did not run in it on as the GPU did not support DX11 (which the game required), and since the newer gfx cards are longer, I needed to upgrade the whole rig.
"According to sources, the problem with Assassin's Creed Unity is that the game is issuing tens of thousands of draw calls — up to 50,000 and beyond, in some cases. "
This is also known as lazy programming i.e. All I learned about 3D CG programming I did with Python, C# and Java in College, and lazy artists, i.e. all I learned about shaders and art assets I got from pressing the render button in Modo, Max and Maya.
I dont advocate for the days of yore, when hand cut ASM made you Michael Abrash's nerd lover, but FFS, these companies end up using engines over and over, cutting the engineering on them more and more, and the TDs and Artists using the front end "make easy button" tools just dont know any better and create shit piles of unoptimized art assets fed into pipelines not ready to handle their next-gen uber shaders that need overdraw 5x.
Learn to make smarter content creators. Make sure to fund engineering for better solutions.
The numbers don't lie. For those who don't want to download a PowerPoint viewer, I'll give the money shot:
Benchmarking machine: Core i7-390x, AMD Radeon R9 290x, running at 1080p with Ultra graphics settings
DX11 renderer: Minimum frame rate 42fps, average frame rate 78fps
Mantle renderer: Minimum frame rate 94fps, average frame rate 120fps
The numbers may not lie, but they can always be cherry picked to better "prove" whatever agenda you are trying to push. In other, not AMD published or sponsored benchmarks (such as these: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-970-maxwell,3941-8.html) Mantle was more typically only ~10% faster than Direct3D 11 in the few games that actually support Mantle.
The only thing I get out of NVidia not wanting to make use of the Mantle API is a pathological case of Not Invented Here syndrome, combined with a long-term gamble of DirectX 12 providing a cross-vendor implementation of an API similar to Mantle.
Which is perfectly understandable, given that Mantle is proprietary and developed by one of the vendors, the competitors have every reason to want it to fail and be replaced by independent standards. It is not like AMD supports PhysX or CUDA either, regardless of any possible performance benefits. Even if they wanted to implement it, they simply cannot because AMD currently does not provide any public documentation, it is only available (under NDA) to game developers. But as long as only a handful of games use Mantle, often only with minor performance improvements, and AMD has ~30% market share against Nvidia's ~50%, the latter has no real reason to support an API that is owned by a major rival.
Nintendos PORTABLE gaming has been ARM (Since at least the GBA and maybe earlier!)
Their consoles since at least the Wii and possibly Gamecube have been PowerPC with an ATI/AMD graphics processor.
Comments like the one linked are a great read, but without ANY sourcing what so ever, it's hard to take it seriously.
Certainly, Nvidia is more than happy to donate engineers and code that favours nvidia hardware (as well as the hardware itself) in return for some branding and an exchange of cash, but to claim that it deliberately gimps older or competing hardware seems beyond the realm of likelihood. IF such a thing was happening, there'd be easy ways of proving it and lawsuits would be flying around pretty quickly. Furthermore, ultimately the performance difference in games between similar competing cards is all in line. You get a bit of variance per title, but it's not like 80% difference here, it's a few frames, single-digit percentages.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
"AMD and Ubisoft are continuing to work together closely to resolve the issue" - Well, Ubisoft, that is something quality assurance should have done BEFORE launching the product! AMD equipped systems are not that uncommon these days and a well organized beta test should have pointed to this problem if it didn't come up before. Then again, 100 fps?? Really? Why? The human eye cannot resolve more than 15 to 16 frames per second. If under heaviest load the frame rate clocks in at around 50 fps and normally does around 70 fps it ought to be plenty because anything higher will have no real impact on the viewer. In any case, it is always bad practice to first blame everyone else when there is trouble.
It depends on how you define inferior. That's why I put them in quotes. If you define it as which hardware can process more data per second then the Wii U is inferior. If you judge on which hardware provides the best entertainment, then I don't know how anyone can say that the Wii U is inferior. The games are fun, they look pretty, and they are memorable. Personally I think a platform that consistently hosts glitchy boring games is an inferior platform.
Those are laptop brands, right? I don't buy any of those, so I have no idea why they do or don't have whatever they do or don't have.
BTW, the A10 is the power hog model. The A6 and A8 lines are where the low power models are. ;) The one you linked is 95W peak. There are A8 models that are nearly as fast and peak at 65W, but use under 25W in normal usage.
The problem with Intel's offerings is that you get really sucky onboard video. The A series gives you a full-featured GPU but that trades speed for low power. You can't compare the Intel to the A-series, you have to compare the Intel plus a mid-range discrete GPU and then you'll see the big power difference. Yes, if you don't need the GPU features, or you want them for cutting edge games with the graphics settings turned up, then you won't want the A-series. But if you want a business machine that can do light 3d editing, using modern software and APIs, and play basic 3d games, etc., then it is a great choice.
Also, very few people care about the "full speed" power usage because it is unlikely to have the CPU as the bottleneck. Even if you're waiting on the machine frequently, you're more likely waiting on the disk or the memory bus. What matters is actual power usage running real software. I do a lot of compiling, but very little on a laptop. Maybe there is a bunch of libraries every few months or something, but even if I'm working on a C project, only the object file whose source I am editing gets re-compiled when I recompile.
The claim that it would somehow... overheat and die... because people care about low idle power use... I just don't see where you even attempted to bridge those ideas. Modern computers don't overheat and die. And that hasn't been a real-world concern since... the Cyrix 5x86 series! Wow, that was a long time ago.
If you didn't assume that I know the technical details of how throttling works, don't bother replying next time. This isn't PC World, this is slashdot.
Actually, you can implement it on any hardware, it's free and you can get all relevant information to implement it with a simple 'hey can I have this?' to AMD.