Home / Software & Gaming / Ubisoft has discovered AC:U low frame rate cause

Ubisoft has discovered AC:U low frame rate cause

Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed development team has been working around the clock since the launch of Unity in an effort to patch out a ton of issues players on all platforms have been facing. On the PC side, things have been pretty bad with low frame rate issues even on high end hardware-  there was even a super creepy ‘no face' bug.

Fortunately, the no face bug has been fixed and Ubisoft discovered that it was only caused by two specific graphics cards. In an update on the AC: Unity live blog, Ubisoft said: “In both cases the issue is resolved with the application of the Day 1 patch (as well as all future patches). This should not be affecting any players who are allowing their game to be automatically patched as recommended with updates as they are released.”

Assassin_s_Creed_Unity_64633

While the no face bug has been ironed out, performance issues still persist on the PC side of things but Ubisoft is making progress. It turns out that the high NPC count isn't the cause of the consistently low frame rate but rather the instruction queue is becoming overloaded:

“We can tell you that we have detected a distinct discrepancy between what we observed in the pre-launch versus post-launch environment. In spite of our testing, it looks like the instruction queue is becoming overloaded and impacting performance.”

It turns out that reducing the size of the crowds does not impact the frame rate at all so they will remain the same:”We have just finished a new round of tests on crowd size but have found it is not linked to this problem and does not improve frame rate, so we will be leaving crowds as they are.”

The Assassin's Creed development team will now be improving the game's instruction prioritization, optimizing which parts of the game get loaded in first- this will hopefully improve the frame rate for many users. Additionally, the navigation system will be updated to smooth out the parkour in the game and there will be a fix for the frame rate when looking at the city from viewpoints.

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KitGuru Says: There's no word on whether or not these fixes will be included in emergency patch 3 but hopefully Ubisoft doesn't take too long with them. I managed to play a bit of Unity and so far, I've enjoyed the story and Arno as a character, unfortunately, I just can't get past the low frame rate. Have you guys been playing Unity? What do you think so far? Are you waiting until the performance is fixed to finally play? 

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29 comments

  1. So no longer AMD’s fault but a instruction queue bottleneck. Just as the AMD engineer pointed out to wccftech last week already. Good job, ubi.

  2. Ubisoft are seriously taking the piss, Poor AMD though, getting slammed for something that they didn’t do. They’ve never let me down, even when Bulldozer was a laughing stock.

  3. I was reading yesterday on tweaktown a response from AMD. Apparently, the game sends about 50k+ draw calls for each scene, when DX11 itself can handle about 10k of them, so even if the system can handle the game, it gets overwhelmed.

  4. Funny.

  5. Their argument that it was AMD’s fault was total rubbish. I have frame rate issues on my Intel 4790k & GTX 980. No AMD at all and I still had problems. Gotta feel sorry for AMD, they were used as an easy target to try escape any blame.

  6. So they figured it out NOW?
    They found NOW that there are frame rate issues?
    They found NOW that the crowd was not the main problem?

    …and we are paying these bastards :/

  7. I’m not touching it for a few more weeks. I’m not paying £50 to play a semi-finished game! I’m already annoyed with myself for believing the hype and pre-purchasing.

  8. Someone said Mantle????
    I guess Mantle was the best option for AC:U, but no. They blamed AMD.

  9. They’re barking the way nVidia tells them to. In the first Assassin’s Creed, DX 10.1 support was there one moment, the next it’s gone, because nVidia didn’t have a 10.1 card out back then.

  10. Sure, rendering 0npc’s costs as much compute power as rendering 1000npc’s…
    It might make a small difference but NO difference does not exist in computerworld…

  11. I’ll buy it if they fix all the performance issues. But after the false accusations against AMD, I won’t pay regular price for it unless they provide Mantle support.

  12. disconnect your internet. that will fix it. Ubisoft is retarded.

  13. They should have left the no face bug in there… That shit’s hilarious.

  14. Can you prove Nvidia told them to say anything?

  15. Even though I wouldn’t go near AMD I have feels for this….

    (or maybe I just hate ubisoft more 🙂 )

  16. No, it won’t. And yes, they are.

  17. Meh, I actually kind of hope they don’t get it fixed too soon and lose a LOT of money as a result. Ubisoft needs some financial incentive to finish their damn games before they release them.

  18. I.ve got it but it is unplayable, system is too slow , need to upgrade graphics so will have to wait for cash to replace

  19. Ubisoft is turning out like EA, the game that ships on disc is no more then a buggy copy of the game, in time when there’s no more internet for the consoles like the ps3, by that I mean no more support for updates when it comes. When a person tries to play this game one day that don’t have the update is going to suffer.

    PhoneyVirus
    https://twitter.com/PhoneyVirus
    https://phoneyvirus.wordpress.com/

  20. I’m not 🙂 and also not wasting my bandwidth.

  21. AC:U on PC is sponsored by nVidia, they also provide their middleware, added developer support etc, to boost their revenue in hardware sales. Since AMD wasn’t involved in the development of the PC version, that is proof enough for me, unless they seriously expected to port the Xbox One version unchanged and have it magically run smoothly.

  22. Closing the stable door when the horse has bolted……mind you a quicker response than watchdogs got which still doesn’t work on my AMD cards….a good old drop in share price coupled with making news headlines on BBC…..(See Linus’s comments on U tube in his pod cast..so funny…also Total buscuit)

  23. In Europe Ubisoft have increase prices by 10 euro’s thats 10 dollars US.
    I am waiting for reduced prices for both ACU and FarCry 4.
    (Lucky to be able cancel Farcry4)

  24. WD runs great on AMD cards with patch 1.06. The problem seems to be on your end.

    http://m.hardocp.com/article/2014/11/11/nvidia_geforce_gtx_980_sli_overclocked_gpu_review/4#.VG2qh5ZXfCQ

  25. I’m forced to wonder how being falsely blamed, scapegoat-style, has affected AMD’s finances in the last quarter – and whether or not it would be worth it for AMD to take it back out of Ubi’s hide.

  26. I just got it for £28 with the DLC of CDKeys… You think i’d ever pay full retail especially for a game as broken as this?

  27. I have amd fx4170,gtx650ti and 4gb ram played game perfetly fine on low and 1080p or 720p and high settings.

  28. actually i haven’t had too many glitches with this game the framerate does drop but then again I’m playing on the lower end of the rec specs… and on bootcamp (on a high end mbp retina 15″…. but still yes i know macs aren’t gaming machines…) so i expect a little less performance… but the one thing thats bugging me is ever since patch 3 rolled out I’ve lost my crowd blending highlight (he circle around you that lets you know your blended and the enemy highlight so its just hit or miss on whether ill get a double or a single assasination when i try and be sneaky…. nothing game breaking… and i guess it actually makes it more realistic… not 100% sure if your blended or not… and not entirely sure if you’ll be able to kill both theses guards in one go…. but it would be nice especially when I’m playing coop and have to take two guards down silently so my buddy can go get another two quickly and such…. just hope it gets fixed soon

  29. Ricardo Monteiro

    If it isn’t the high npc count then what is it?!

    It has to be… In places like the Notre Dame and others like execution locations, where there are TONS of NPC’s, the framerate drops down to 20-25 fps…

    However in other places like Sorbonne, Saint Jaques, Le Quartier Latin, Panthéon, etc… The game runs smooth as silk, and when I look down to the streets there are only a normal number of NPC’s walking around and talking on street…

    If it isn’t NPC’s then they need to figure out wtf is going on… I’m kinda giving up hope, its almost May and still the same issues persist patch after patch…