HardOCP: Assassin's Creed Unity Performance Video Card Review

[PPB]

Now that I cant see the images in a full blown browser:

Third image in his first post of screens: most right window's shadows. At the top of the window's shadow you can clearly see what can probably is the MOST JAGGED LINE I HAVE EVER SEEN IN A 2014 VIDEOGAME. Dem 640x480 CS 1.5 jagginess.

Also, all scenes are utterly dark due to the lack of a proper GI implementation, compensated with overblown (burn effect) sunlight and some crappy volumetric light effect. Pro tip: Real life DOES have GI.

 

[Carfax83]

Downsampled from 4K to 1080p for example with max settings (MSAA/TXAA etc) or custom tweaks (sweetfx injects), boost IQ for screenshots but its actually not playable. Often used in friendly screenshot competitions.

Like I asked before, wouldn't downsampled screenshots be a much greater size? I don't think those screenshots are downsampled at all.

I just took some screenshot and I'm uploading them to my ImageShack account so I'll put this debate to rest once and for all..

 

[Carfax83]

The thing Carfax that leads many people to be suspect of your posts is quite simple.

You own Assassin's Creed Unity. Yet you don't post your own screenshots. You post ones that are heavily circulated on Neogaf. Most of the times I see them posted on Neogaf, it's by the same fanboy users of Ubisoft games.

As an owner of this game with an HEDT platform and GTX 970 SLI you would think you'd be the perfect canididate to create those screenshots/detail while displaying your frame rate (Without cherry picking).

Instead, you repost other people's screenshots (which we have 0 clue what frame rates they had, whether the shots were downsampled, photoshopped, etc.).

Fair enough.

The reason why I didn't post any of my own screenshots is because I've been so busy lately, plus I hadn't progressed very far in the game. I thought those pics were from Versailles (which you can't access until a certain point in the game), but I was wrong.

They are actually from the Palais Du Luxembourg, which I can access and I'm now posting MY screenshots which have NOT been downsampled or tampered with in any form or fashion.

I'm just waiting for them to finish uploading, so prepare to be inundated with screenshots

 

[Carfax83]

For example, Crysis 1 achieved next gen status as hardly any games for 3-4 years after looked 1 gen beyond Crysis. The same thing with Crysis 3. You cannot say that AC Unity is 1 generation ahead of Crysis 3, Tomb Raider, Metro Last Light. AC Unity is current generation, not next gen.

I'm hesitant to enter another lengthy debate with you on this RS, because you just keep rehashing the same old arguments over and over again.

Case in point, you're comparing AC Unity to Crysis 3, Tomb Raider etcetera when AC Unity is a fully fledged seamless open world game and the latter are all linear and segmented..

Making a good looking linear game is undoubtedly much easier to do than a seamless open world game as resource management isn't as problematic.

That said, I think AC Unity blows the doors off of Crysis 3 and all the other games you mentioned, as my screenshots will soon demonstrate :sneaky:

 

[2is]

Looking forward to seeing the screen shots... Hurry up before my popcorn gets cold please.

 

[Carfax83]

OK here are my screenshots, fresh off the press. No downsampling was used, or SweetFX or any other shenanigans. These are raw 1440p images taken at maxed settings.

That said, they are still compressed and can't fully depict what the game actually looks like on my monitor.

Do note the 60 FPS in the upper left hand corner, for all those that think my screenshots represent unplayable settings

 

[Carfax83]

Here are some outsides ones:

 

[SlowSpyder]

What settings are you guys talking about not running at 60FPS? Carfax, is that with AA on? It might be because I'm looking at your 1440P images on my 1200P monitor, but things look really jaggy to me. I think Hardocp mentioned even when turning on some settings things would revert or wouldn't stick. Like I said, I could be wrong because of my monitor and I've also never used FXAA, but things don't look smooth on my monitor. Lots of stair case like diagonal lines.

 

[2is]

I see some jaggies, but they don't look that bad to me. I doubt I'd notice them in-game. At some point I'll find out for myself, I have the game but still working on Black Flag

 

[Carfax83]

What settings are you guys talking about not running at 60FPS? Carfax, is that with AA on? It might be because I'm looking at your 1440P images on my 1200P monitor, but things look really jaggy to me. I think Hardocp mentioned even when turning on some settings things would revert or wouldn't stick. Like I said, I could be wrong because of my monitor and I've also never used FXAA, but things don't look smooth on my monitor. Lots of stair case like diagonal lines.

My screenshots had FXAA enabled, which doesn't fully get rid of all the jaggies, but it definitely gets rid of most of them. You can't even notice them when playing in fact..

The only way to get rid of all jaggies and texture crawling, is to use TXAA but the performance hit is huge! I'm talking about close to a 30 FPS hit..

And yeah, using a smaller size monitor would exaggerate the jaggies for you since the image looks larger relative to your screen, which is almost like zooming in..

Looking at my own screenshots, the jaggies are very difficult to see..

 

[SlowSpyder]

My screenshots had FXAA enabled, which doesn't fully get rid of all the jaggies, but it definitely gets rid of most of them. You can't even notice them when playing in fact..

The only way to get rid of all jaggies and texture crawling, is to use TXAA but the performance hit is huge! I'm talking about close to a 30 FPS hit..

And yeah, using a smaller size monitor would exaggerate the jaggies for you since the image looks larger relative to your screen, which is almost like zooming in..

Looking at my own screenshots, the jaggies are very difficult to see..

It very well could mostly be due to my lower resolution monitor, unfortunately I don't have access to something with higher resolution. In the first picture I see the jaggies on the floor and base of the pillars. In the second picture, the doors and gold trim on the walls. But again, that could just be my monitor.

 

[BFG10K]

But why are there stuttering in SLI/CF in FC3, SLI shadowing bugs in FC4, broken SLI in Watch Dogs for 6+ months and flashing glitches in AC Unity with SLI?

The same reason why not all games get 100% scaling.

The same reason some games need multi-GPU turned off.

That is to say, the game-specific SLI/CF code is either broken, or the IHVs are unwilling to pour the necessary resources to make it work.

The rendering engine is obviously too complex for AMD/nVidia to fix it at their end without significant effort, so they're leaning on Ubi. But again, there's no API for SLI/CF, so it's not the developer's problem to deal with it if issues arise.

Notice how all of these are Ubisoft games using poorly optimized glitchy Ubisoft game engines? There is only so much AMD and NV can do with SLI/CF when the game engine is broken from the beginning and this seems to be a consistent theme with Ubisoft games in the last 3-4 years.

I'd almost guarantee the CF/SLI issues would vanish if SFR was used. But since both vendors aggressively push for more performance, they run into more and more issues as engine complexities rise (e.g. inter-frame dependencies which aren't trivial to resolve).

As for [H]'s review, I noticed their system was overclocked. I skimmed the review but not once did I see "we fresh installed Windows and everything else with everything at stock and observed the same issues".

This is shoddy and irresponsible journalism, and reeks of the overclocking entitlement mentality that the internet fosters. Somehow people have convinced themselves that running hardware outside of spec is expected to be guaranteed just because a few cherry-picked programs don't show issues.

In reality it's beyond the scope of a single individual to truly test the stability of overclocked hardware.

Again, the game definitely has issues, but there's also a bit more going on here.

 

[Silverforce11]

Looking at my own screenshots, the jaggies are very difficult to see..

Lots of aliasing. But I give it credit where its due, the interiors are amazing.

Exterior is average.

I'll wait til its on sale and get it just to run through the interiors. I've been to most of those places recently, with my own RL photos, would be interesting to compare.

 

[96Firebird]

I've been to most of those places recently, with my own RL photos, would be interesting to compare.

Lucky! I wish traveling to Europe wasn't so expensive, and I got more vacation time from work. I'd love to see some of these places in person, we just don't have that kind of history around here.

 

[HE-MAN24]

as soon as GTA V is released people will completely forget what a mess AC Unity was/is. i believe that GTA 5 might just might and i hope will be the game that will make people realize that their upgrade to maxwell gen 2 was really worth it. ( may be i am a dreamer. dont know, i am high)

 

[tential]

as soon as GTA V is released people will completely forget what a mess AC Unity was/is. i believe that GTA 5 might just might and i hope will be the game that will make people realize that their upgrade to maxwell gen 2 was really worth it. ( may be i am a dreamer. dont know, i am high)

Yup, by the content of that post, you certainly are.

 

[Carfax83]

Lots of aliasing. But I give it credit where its due, the interiors are amazing.

The aliasing that you are seeing is likely due to you having a lower rez monitor I'm guessing. Having a lower resolution monitor makes the image look zoomed, compared to what I'm seeing..

Exterior is average.

There are some really nice exterior areas. I just didn't have the time to take screenshots of them. Also, playing the game is visually much more appealing compared to viewing it through screenshots.

I'll wait til its on sale and get it just to run through the interiors. I've been to most of those places recently, with my own RL photos, would be interesting to compare.

Yep, should be!

 

[Carfax83]

as soon as GTA V is released people will completely forget what a mess AC Unity was/is. i believe that GTA 5 might just might and i hope will be the game that will make people realize that their upgrade to maxwell gen 2 was really worth it. ( may be i am a dreamer. dont know, i am high)

GTA V will be great, but I don't think it will be as technically impressive as AC Unity. AC Unity is on a whole other level when it comes to density and seamlessness..

 

[Alqoxzt]

The inner scenes are looking nice due to better indirct lighting while outdoor scenes are just garbage

 

[Gloomy]

Judging from what I've seen of the pop-in and LOD issues seamless is not the word I would use to describe this game.

 

[Carfax83]

 

[Alqoxzt]

Now Ryse outdoor
​

 

[Alqoxzt]

some more Ryse(tbh not played by me)

 

[Carfax83]

Judging from what I've seen of the pop-in and LOD issues seamless is not the word I would use to describe this game.

Since every modern 3D engine uses streaming technology, every single game has pop in and LoD issues to an extent. The question is, how well they can hide it.

Some games like Crysis 3 hide it very well, because the engine is very efficient, and the game itself is linear and segmented which undoubtedly helps a lot because there is less to render at any one time and you can manage resources easier because the player is very limited in his mobility.

With a game like AC Unity on the other hand, pop in and LoD should be much more difficult to control because much more is being rendered, and almost the entire world is open to the player with very little restrictions on movement.

That said, I think that the AnvilNext engine is quite good at masking pop in and LoD generally speaking. Case in point, the screenshot above. For a detailed scene like that, very little detail is actually being sacrificed when you consider the distance those objects are from the camera.

The turret/spire furthest from the camera doesn't have all the textures yet, but the rest of the building does. The buildings on the extreme left in the distance also have lower LoD, but they are inconsequential as they're not the focus..

The biggest problem with AC Unity LoD wise are the rapid LoD changes on NPCs at short distances. Patch 1.4 improved this, but it can still be tweaked further. Not sure if they're going to do it though, because LoD and draw distance are dependent on hardware and the consoles are already tapped out in this game.

 

[Grooveriding]

So far all the major Gameworks titles have been technical disasters to one degree or another. AC: Unity being the most outright broken and Watch Dogs a close second. FC4 still has issues with the gameworks PCSS shadows being too dark and there is a related SLI ghosting issue in conjunction with SMAA, but it is pretty decent apart from that and performs well unlike the other messes.

Witcher 3 is going to have to deliver on good optimization, no broken graphical features, functional multi-gpu performance and the rest. It's the next title with heavy use of gameworks and should help to highlight if it is gameworks that is broken or ubisoft using gameworks

At this point AC unity is a write off. Outdoor scenes look like the UE3 engine to me, horrible textures and NPCs look like they are coming off the Xbox 360. Four patches later and the game is still broken. It's another Watch Dogs, a game that will forever be broken. [H] nailed it when they suggested the game is suitable for a full recall, refund of money to customers and re-release once the game is not in an alpha state.