Assassin's Creed Unity

Don't do that, it's not better on consoles where arbitrary compromises will be made for you.
I'll take my not-so-well optimized PC version with stuttering than to cope with 900p/30fps in 2014.

You can't make a PC version worse than its console counterparts. It would take an unquantifiable amount of incompetence.

 

And yet they did. The PC version of Watch_Dogs is an anomaly of PC programming. You can see my config in my profile, I'm an experienced PC user and have been playing games on PC for like, 15 years or so now? I'm using the latest drivers and Ubisoft's day-zero patch, the results are insulting, to say the least.

My FPS is getting down to 21-22 in particular places while driving fast. I have the PS4 version as well and even though it looks a bit muddy compared to the PC version, it friggin' runs butter smooth. So they actually did that, they created a PC version that gets shamelessly beaten by an inferior console version.

PhazeDelta1 is so right, from now on I won't even bother myself with their PC releases. I'm having enough stress already in my daily life.

 

I have not been kind with Ubisoft's optimization either but I still prefer the PC version over what I played of the PS4 version. On PS4 no stuttering to speak of, however tearing is there and the low resolution really does not do any favors to the artists' work. Let's not even talk about the Xbox One version and its 792p/toned down AO.
A patch is incoming, will it completely eliminate stuttering ? Maybe, maybe not but I still believe the PC version edges out the other skus easily.

That's your call but I don't think you will like playing at sub1080p/30fps. The stuttering can be mitigated by disabling pagefile.

 

One thing I have to say is that the ultra textures make a huge deal of difference on PC version. Especially the cutscenes look much, much better with higher-res textures but when I turn it on the game turns into a slide show. And there I have 4 gigs of VRAM on my GPU.

 

That's very strange. What AA option have you set ?
Ultra textures + 2xMSAA should fit within 4GB of VRAM.

 

I know right. I'm using Temporal SMAA, not using vsync, everything set to ultra except textures on high. Using 14.6 beta drivers on Windows 8.1, Ubisoft's day one patch installed. Either it's a very nasty AMD problem or my CPU is bottlenecking me (though I doubt it).

 

No I would definitely rule out a CPU bottleneck, a Sandy Bridge I5 is plenty sufficient.

In your case there is nothing you can do except waiting for Ubisoft to release a patch and AMD to improve their Watch Dogs driver.

 

The trailer was awesome, right?

 

name one trailer of Assassin's franchise that wasn't .

 

Plissken, AMD does seem to have a problem with very high CPU overhead and lack of multicore utilization in Watch Dogs..

PCgameshardware.de tested CPU overhead and utilization and NVidia was definitely superior in both aspects..

It might be something that Ubisoft needs to patch out, or it could be that AMD's drivers need more optimization for the game.

 

Truth be told it's not exactly a discovery that AMD D3D11's drivers suck.
Nvidia demonstrated this when they achieved very similar results compared to AMD's Mantle under D3D (Thief, Star Swarm).
It's proof that AMD didn't "max out" the D3D API and therefore it's easier for them to push Mantle.

 

Yeah, well that decision by AMD to forgo D3D11 development and go with Mantle is going to come back and bite them in the rear. Watch Dogs may just be a sign of things to come of these final generation of advanced DX11 games, where NVidia has a massive performance lead.

It's possible as well that Watch Dogs is using DX11 multithreading, a feature that AMD does not support, but we can't find out unless they tell us.

 

It must, otherwise how can such a delta in performance be explained ?
Sure we may lack data to be conclusively certain of that but this is very strong possibility. Nvidia's Gameworks has nothing to do with AMD's wonky drivers.
That was weak on the part of AMD to even put forward the idea that Nvidia and Ubisoft must have a deal of a sort in place to prevent AMD from optimizing Watch Dogs for Radeon gpus. AMD in my opinion should stop crying and get back to work.

They will have to ramp up the quality of their DX11 drivers if they don't want to lose marketshare to Nvidia.

In the meantime I look forward more multithreaded games. It's always nice to see high-end CPUs being put to good use. Scaling isn't perfect (it can hardly be) but Watch Dogs is definitely better multithreaded than the average.

 

I've been an AMD user for a very long time though (started with AMD 4870, then bought 6850, then upgraded to 7850, and finally to R9 290) and Watch_Dogs is the only game in a very, very long time (like, 8 years) that runs so poorly that it's unplayable on my system. There has to be something wrong on the Ubisoft's side. I can play Battlefield 4 at ultra 1080p with rock solid 60 fps, why am I getting embarrassing results all of a sudden with Watch_Dogs?

I doubted my CPU (and kinda still do) but I've been playing Crysis 3, Battlefield 4, Metro Last Light and other demanding games on my PC and my CPU has never been a problem, did Ubisoft create the most CPU-hungry game all of a sudden? That doesn't make sense, something's strangely wrong with this game and we cannot find what until there's another patch or driver update. If they cannot fix the issue though I'll never ever buy a Ubisoft game on PC before reading some benchmark articles on the net.

 

That's very interesting, Watch_Dogs runs near flawlessly unless I enable MSAA (Thus I'm using Temporal-SMAA) since that causes a few visual glitches (14.6 might actually have resolved those now, need to try actually.) but otherwise I've not had any problems with the game aside from my own tweaks lowering the framerate a bit.
(Mostly only affects the Pawnee area.)

Unless the game really is so CPU bound.
(The game definitively needs a strong CPU - maybe it could be optimized further via patching? - but you're using a pretty nice overclock already that should compensate for that and it's a quad core - http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Watch...s/Watch-Dogs-Test-GPU-CPU-Benchmarks-1122327/ <- The CPU benchmark charts around the middle of that article.)

 

Anyone else has broken AC4 MP atm? My Abstergo credits stay the same no matter how many matches i play. Can't buy any abilities

 

Looks like we can shoot blades from our wrists in AC Unity:

http://www.amazon.com/Ubisoft-Assassins-Creed-Unity-Phantom/dp/B00KR4MLCO

 

And that's the thing I cannot understand, you have a r9 290 trix yourself and you're saying that it works just fine. I don't mean to imply you're lying as there's one guy that I know of, who's actually working on game development and he tells me that the game acts differently on every PC in their office with similar configurations. Wrap your head around that.

 

That's probably it then, if the game works differently on every system they tested it with it's probably very sensitive to hardware and software changes.

Using MSI Afterburner I can now also see VRAM usage, it's usually around 2.5 GB but in some instances it shoots up to over 3 GB though since it goes back down after a while it seems to properly unload textures though it still needs a lot of memory. (System RAM usage however seems to just increase.)


Ubisoft's game engines tend to be a bit quirky or well whatever one could call them, there's usually a lot of tweaks via patches although actual optimization results can vary.
(Tends to be promoted by Nvidia as well, unsure actually how AMD managed to get Far Cry 3 but maybe it's just a matter of money.)

Will be interesting to see how this iteration of Anvil works, for Watch_Dogs I guess it doesn't help that Disrupt is part Dunia and part Anvil and then some custom code as well.


EDIT: WD screens, decided to check performance more carefully via Afterburner.

Spoiler

Framerate is capped to 59 so it's going to be bouncing around 58 - 59 due to that cap.


City view, framerate is just under 50 as data is streamed/loaded. (As a side note running and more so driving definitively affects framerate as data has to be loaded and unloaded faster.)


Pawnee, most demanding area in the game since most of the game can be seen from this area so framerate is just over 45


Central Pawnee, framerate is back up to just above 53


Some slum area in the city, framerate is at it's cap of 59


Wandering around said slum area, framerate is at just below 57


Alternate view from a security camera, framerate is bouncing between 58 and 59


Urban area, framerate is down but still just over 50


The motel, framerate is again bouncing around 58 and 59


View out from motel, framerate is just above 51

.

So yeah you were right in that the game is quite demanding, max settings at 1920x1200 but with T2x SMAA instead of 2x MSAA and it can usually maintain above 50 FPS but some locations (Pawnee primarily.) will see a drop down to 40 unfortunately.

If you're trying to reach constant 60 at 1080P I guess you will want a 780Ti or possibly a 290X, going for 2560x1600 or 4K you would need SLI or Crossfire, if that's the resolution you are playing the game at I understand the concerns about framerate, game gets pretty demanding as resolution is increased.

Failing that lowering some setting might be enough to maintain fluid 60 in most areas of the game, say shadow detail or changing AO from HBAO+ high to MSSAO perhaps.


EDIT: Oh right, framerate tolerance and fluctuations, I'm OK with anything above or around 30 really but for others 60 FPS minimum is a must and for those with 120Hz monitors or above even that might not be enough.

 

Cant Wait for this!!!!! Im getting the same feeling seeing this as i got when i saw the original Assassins Creed