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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.
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.
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.
This happened with the last X game - X:Rebirth, released with a lot of fanfare and expectation and hype and.... truly, truly dreadful. Not just in gameplay but bugged to hell and back again.
The forums on Steam and Egosoft were full of people either asking how to get a refund, complaining they had been told to "sod off" by Steam, or rejoicing that they had managed to scrape a refund out of Steam.
Incidentally, this game too was not available for review before it was on sale.
And how did you manage to make a call which doesn't exist?
Ah, a time traveler from the past!! Welcome to 2014 fellow AC! Now, that extension will be ratified for OpenGL 4.3 at some point in July 2013, a tiny bit before the release of OpenGL 4.4. Speaking of which, we're up to 4.5 now, with some low-level goodies that unfortunately AMD is slow to release a driver for (again). Sad, seeing as they will be starting the whole low-level race with something called Mantle. (end of spoilers)
Google that call and you find the ONE place it's mentioned on the internet - some slideshow about "zero driver overhead"
Well, of course back then you wouldn't find it on Google. After July 2013 though there'll be this nice page on the opengl.org registry site detailing it. Hopefully an advance reading will help you when it gets released in your own timeline.
Cheers from the future,
A fellow AC
Mod parent down for not knowing that in the OpenGL specification documents the "gl" prefix that you otherwise find in actual code is omitted. The call has been available in NVIDIA and AMD drivers since the second half of last year, and is documented in the spec: https://www.opengl.org/registr... see "MultiDrawElementsIndirectCountARB" (again, the "gl" part is always omitted in spec documents). You dun goofed now, AC, and embarrassed yourself. So no, the actual call is not glMultiDrawElementsIndirect and is nowhere as restricted, because it has the critical difference that the count to draw is now also stored in a GPU buffer and thus can be written by the GPU. Combined with the bindless graphics NVIDIA extension and bindless textures in OpenGL 4.4, you can even set up the whole scene graph on the GPU. Finally, as for my experience--(re)writing a graphics engine is exactly what my team is doing. By the way, maybe you should post your comment also at the official opengl forums so the rest of us can too have a good laugh.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I imagine Ubisoft's shareholders care.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
If you buy with a credit card (which you are if you're using steam), you can call your credit card company and get them to issue a charge back.
I've done this with a couple software titles where I was told to "sod off" and nothing bad happens, and you get your money back.
The thing that makes me sad is most people don't ask for a refund, so they are creating an incentive for video game companies to create bad titles.
It's almost like the Producers, in video game form. Hype up a game, get a ton of preorders, make it absolute steaming shit, say "Sorry no refunds" and haul in the cash
If you buy with a credit card (which you are if you're using steam), you can call your credit card company and get them to issue a charge back.
If you try this, there's a 99% chance that you'll lose your steam/origin/ubi account, and everything in it. Companies are vindictive like that.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
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.