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: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: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

[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.