So a couple of months ago I treated myself to a 980Ti as an upgrade from a 780. 780 wasn't exactly a slouch, but wasn't giving me locked out 60FPS at high settings any more, so decided, after a lot of huffing and puffing, to go for the plunge and get more or less the best affordable card on the market. Results @ 1080P: Witcher 3 - pretty much locked out 60FPS maxed out. All Crysis games - completely locked out. Dragon Age Inquisition - pretty much locked out 60 FPS more or less maxed Metro LL - completely butter including the benchmark Fallout 4 - butter All the Unigine benchmarks - butter Black Ops 3 - 90% locked out I could go on forever In fact near enough every game I tested was pretty much liquid smooth - except, and here's the kicker - pretty much every Ubisoft published game. From ACU, to ACS, to FC4, Anno 2205, all of them - the results are consistently inconsistent. Basically all games using Gameworks - HBAO, SSAO, MFAA, PCSS etc etc - try to max these NVIDIA ENDORSED FEATURES and the FPS dies. Syndicate I can up the AA to FXAA & 2 x MSAA but PCSS stays at + and HBAO is at high. Go beyond that and the FPS rarely even makes 50. My point is why are all games from this company so ridiculously poorly optimised? These are features FOR this card, FOR this chipset, yet even the bleeding edge tech cannot run them at a locked-in 60FPS. Or can we just drop Gameworks because I can't see any difference between high and ultra in half of these settings. Thoughts?
Half those titles you mentioned have GameWorks features and like you said run smooth. Ubisoft games just tend to come with less than desirable performance, in saying that though people also need to realise the kind of performance hit some settings will contribute to a game. Everyone was up in arms about AC Unity when that was released but that game had extensive use of drawcalls with NPCs, used PBR, volumetric fog, GI, etc. As far as the blame game goes, that should always be on the developers/publishers for trying to push games out at a certain release point instead of when the game is good and ready. They're the ones that actually have input/control over a game.
I'd buy that if it wasn't for the fact Witcher 3's features are arguably more advanced (some of the PP settings are marquee and incredibly demanding) and it runs brilliantly. Well over a year on and Far Cry 4 still isn't butter? Even Unity. Also, this passage tries to generalise developers and publishers when this whole thread is about Ubi. And that's my point. But you've not really explained why Ubi games run slower. You can't use their features as a reason when other games use similar. Personally my guess would be, in the case of FC4, ACU and ACS is that they're filled with so much bloat and NPC calls that the sheer unnecessary weight of the game world drags the rest down. But then, there are other games with similar levels of game world complexity, in terms of content, such as the new generation of games from WB like Mordor and Mad Max.
Is funny because that features are designed to work best on NVIDIA GPU's and even with a top-of-the-line GPU, runs like crap !. I'll never try to run these games on my system with AMD GPUs ... a PowerPoint presentation will be more fluid
I'd say this is a result of poor optimization by the Ubisoft devs perhaps combined with a mentality that "close to 60fps is good enough." Time and money priorities are also a big part of it, its a business after all and some are better at it than others. Maybe Ubi is getting cheap on their engineers, forcing them to move on to other projects or devote less time to optimization. Sure they're using the same feature libraries that nVidia offers, but that's no guarantee Ubi makes efficient use of them. Or, if you have your tinfoil hat, nVidia and Ubi are conspiring to keep you thirsty for the next generation of GPU.
It's ubicrap. I'm avoiding their games for more than one reason. If every other game from another dev runs nicely (like op said), and only the ones from ubi acting up, it's very logical to say it's the ubi game's fault. Not much you could do besides reducing the settings to regain your locked 60fps.
The only Ubi game that I can think of which don't give me FPS issues is Rayman Legends or Origins AC Unity or Syndicate run pretty badly even with my high end system. FC4 runs OK but only OK, should run better.
Turn down the gamework PCSS shadows. Those things are FPS killers. I turn then down and I am running 980ti SLI.
It's mostly because the Ubisoft guys just aren't that good in writing high-performance code. If it reaches 30FPS at ultra on the fastest CPU+GPU on the market, ship it. Good enough. One of their lead developers commented on the 30FPS target at the C++ "Going Native" conference, IIRC, on a talk he gave. He was discussing the high-performance code practices they have for Assassin's Creed Unity, and how well their coding works for making the game run awesomely fast. That's when I came to the conclusion that these guys aren't really cutting it when it comes to high-performance coding.
Funny thing is All nvidia gameworks titles suffer massive fps drops when u use those features ,,, Laughable indeed Even Assassins Creeds Syndicate i have to go easy on the Gameworks setting or i go from plus 60fps to 30fps and lower with two 980 ti's @1440p
Yeah their code is bad.. Instead of optimizing gameworks they go cripple to the max so folks go and buy newer gpus thinking my current gpu is not strong enough, while in fact its all in the code.. Just like with physx2.xx, inefficient and some used last gen high_end gpus for it :grin:
