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.

Comments

The culture of responsibility switches.

[Thanshin]

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?

Re:The culture of responsibility switches.

[TellarHK]

This isn't a testing fault. I'm sure they tested the hell out of it. Dozens if not hundreds of QA people sat in cubes for months, maybe years, testing bits of this game as it got produced. And I'm sure that many of them wrote up really detailed, well reasoned explanations of just how broken it was in every single way that people are counting today.

And nobody cared because the game had to launch before the holiday season of 2014, Thousands of jobs and millions upon millions of dollars were at stake.

It isn't that nobody tested, it's that nobody really cared.

If at first you don't succeed...

[theshowmecanuck]

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.

Re:If at first you don't succeed...

[Tyr07]

Ubisoft probably has this as a moto around their office, painted on the walls.

I'm really getting sick of Ubisoft, the last game I purchased under their banner was Anno 2070. Great game, only part of that game that ever pisses me off? Ubisoft game launcher that comes with it and is necessary to operate it. Even though i purchased it on steam and launch from there.

Ubisoft needs to focus less on market manipulation and DRM software, more on quality games. Anno 2070 was a fantastic game, great quality, you waste time and effort on your uplay launcher and other things trying to mimic software that is out there that already does it better.

Sure, just because there is better software doesn't mean you shouldn't try, but at least (Even though I'm not a fan of Origin) At least EA with Origin actually put serious effort into making a distribution platform and making improvements to it so it has similar quality to something well known as Steam.

Now, I still think Steam is way beyond Origin and definitely my preferred content distributor, and I have origin only for Mass Effect 3 and Battlefield 3. Steam gets installed every single time as part of my top 5 programs to reinstall if I format my system, for my contacts and extensive game library. Also because Steam feels quick, I don't feel it bogs down my system, and is useful to me.

Re:Ok, even giving them the benefit of the doubt

[TellarHK]

Let's also take into account that Ubisoft had to know something was up, because the pre-release copies they gave game reviewers came with an embargo that lasted 17 hours into the release date. I'm not surprised at all to see this, though I'm admittedly surprised it's quite as large a problem as it is. When they announced the system requirements, I winced. I know that the horsepower demand for a game engine designed for a modern console is finally going to be a lot more demanding than last year's titles, but a GTX 680 as minimum specification? Someone screwed up engine design, plain and simple.

Re:Or, you know, use OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

Please tell us which game engines you have written which use this call. How do their feature sets compare to AC:Unity? And how did you manage to make a call which doesn't exist? Google that call and you find the ONE place it's mentioned on the internet - some slideshow about "zero driver overhead" - so I know where you're getting your information, and it's not via hard won experience with OpenGL 4 vs DX11. The actual call is glMultiDrawElementsIndirect, and its restrictions are such that it can provide some improvement in driver overhead, but not much, and nothing you can't do manually anyway in the rare cases when you actually have 10,000 draw calls all with the exact same GPU setup (render states, vertex format, shader, etc. etc.) but for some reason can't use basic DX9-level instancing, which is universally supported (which is more than you can say for OGL 4).

Re:A highly relevant comment from the previous pos

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Ok, even giving them the benefit of the doubt

[ledow]

"pre-release copies they gave game reviewers came with an embargo that lasted 17 hours into the release date"

Always an encouraging sign to any sensible buyer.

STOP BUYING STUFF ON RELEASE. Wait a day. A week. A month. Until then, I have no sympathy for people lumbered with a buggy release based on paid-for or embargoed reviews.

Re:A highly relevant comment from the previous pos

[0123456]

DX12 will be irrelevant for years if Microsoft don't release it for Wiindows 7.

Re:Ok, even giving them the benefit of the doubt

[mrchaotica]

Let's even assume that something went badly wrong in the AMD optimisation.

But even allowing for that, how does it explain the console versions being such a mess?

All the consoles run AMD chips. Therefore, getting rendering performance right on AMD was really, really fucking important.

Re:Ok, even giving them the benefit of the doubt

[mrchaotica]

It's perfectly possible that it is purely an AMD performance issue, maybe there's no equivalent nVidia posting because there's no fucking performance problem on nVidia cards because that's what they built against and tested on?

If Ubisoft built and tested a game intended to run on consoles exclusively on nVidia hardware, they're goddamn morons because all the consoles use AMD chips!

Re:Ok, even giving them the benefit of the doubt

[UnknowingFool]

Also it's not like Ubisoft didn't know well in advance that Sony and MS chose AMD to be their CPU/GPU for their next gen consoles. I would say engine development was botched and they are trying to cover it up.

We, the customer are mostly to blame here.

[danknight48]

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.