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Performance Analysis: Assassin's Creed Unity (Digital Foundry)

spannicus

Member
And I saw amighty beast wailing in the sea. The army of ten studios marching with blood stained garments devouring the lands. The worshippers of consoles were overwhelmed. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
 

BeforeJam

Neo Member
Jesus fucking christ, Ubisoft. Alright, so in a perfect timeline:

  • This game is delayed by one year to get its shit sorted.
  • Rogue, which is apparently far better anyway, is cross-gen and becomes this year's AC game.

If this were a few months ago and you were an exec at Ubi, you'd think you'd see where the wind was blowing and do the above.
 
Well, yes, obviously, but I was under the impression the Xbox was running 3 operating systems at once, along with the Kinect features, hence why they'd decided to overclock their identical CPU to compensate.

To be honest the way the PS4 OS is running right now I think it needs al the power it can get. My messages take so long to send I swear Yodel could courier them faster.
 
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Kinda thinking Massive will pull through, judging from their last PRs (lol). They still seem to have some pull even though they were bought out. Anyways, I'll cancel at the first sign of shadiness like I did for AC.

If it has Ubisoft's name on the box, I'm not touching it. This was it.
 

woen

Member
Jesus fucking christ, Ubisoft. Alright, so in a perfect timeline:

  • This game is delayed by one year to get its shit sorted.
  • Rogue, which is apparently far better anyway, is cross-gen and becomes this year's AC game.

If this were a few months ago and you were an exec at Ubi, you'd think you'd see where the wind was blowing and do the above.

Not really.
 

CLEEK

Member
So the analysis shows:
- Xbox One has a better framerate (still not locked at 30) when running around outside
- Both consoles are roughly 30 FPS while indoors
- PS4 has a better frame rate during fights via DF? Weird
- PS4 has better cutscene FPS
- Both versions suffer from graphical glitches

Sounds like both versions are train wrecks to me. Arguing over which train wreck is better than another train wreck seems like a waste of time when we can just roll our eyes at Ubisoft.

The Ubisoft AAA development process is fucked.

No idea about Unity, but Black Flag was worked on by eight separate studios spread around the world (over 900 devs in total), each one working on different components, which they then glue together during the final crunch and hope it works. Leaves little scope for optimisation and QA.

No wonder Ubisoft games always have performance issues. I some ways, it's amazing that their annual franchise updates work as well as they do.
 

Endo Punk

Member
It's easier to fully take advantage of both systems as Ubi claims if you only do so vertically. This game is a mess and should not be blaimed on the CPU but how shoddy of a work Ubi has done. This is what happens when you create an annual franchise; you just dont have the time to truly take advantage, and in Ubi's case, the talent too.
 

omonimo

Banned
That's the point I'm trying to make, it's not that simple. These GPUs are largely the same, Ps4 has more execution units, but they have lots of the same hardware in it. And al of those run faster on xbone due the higher clock.



Of course there are. Plenty of reasons actually.

Like low performant SDKs with high cpu overhead, virtualization costs, etc... Do you not noticed a trend where as soon as Ms started improving their tools the performance started creeping closer to PS4? Ps4 will probably still outperform the xbone, but early titles were not showing the real baseline performance of the xbone hardware.


That's subjective as fuck.

I think games like FH2 and SO have nothing to be ashamed of when compared to Ps4 exclusives, in many ways they even outdo them. But it's a bit pointless arguing over that,.



I will try to simplify:

- The cutscenes are largely gpu bound. Ps4 drops frames as well, so it's not being capped or anything. Still, the performance delta is not a single time close to the 40% the extra flops on Ps4 would lead to believe? Why? It might be because there are parts of the rendering pipeline (like for example setting up the vertex data as fragments to the pixel shader) that runs faster on xbone, which can make up for the difference. It might also be that the shaders they are using rely on bandwidth or some other resource than flops. Either way, the 40% isn't showing here, while curiously a 10% overclock is netting fairly often more than 10% frames for xbone during gameplay.

- Using the smoke grenade causes framedrops on both platforms, but on Ps4 not only the drop is more severe it's also the lowest point for the console (18fps). Ps4 has twice the number of ROPs, why does this happen? Kinda right to pinpoint a culprit without any profile data, but looking at the architectures might give an answer: The esram on xbone provides on a theoretical max, more bandwidth than the entire GDDR5 on Ps4, but that bandwidth is only accessible when writing and reading from it at the same time, something that a huge curtain of smoke might very well do. The game uses deferred lighting, has tons of post processing which relies on screen space, and has some alpha effects, it's not out of the ordinary to say they are often bandwidth bound, so in a scenario like that, the esram might be an advantage for the xbone, despite having less ROPs.

See what I'm talking about? The Ps4 might be more powerful, but in one scenario it doesn't outperforms as well as it should, and on the other is being outperformed, despite theoretically having more hardware to deal with the issue.
The hell you have smoked my friend. The only advantage of the esram it's rendering in different framebuffer but still bandwith it's slower of the ps4.The only real advantage in the hardware of the xbone it's just, parodically, when the game it's cpu bounded, but we are talking of 3 fps of advantage, at the best, in the rendering. From the little of what I know.
 

dreamlock

The hero Los Santos deserves
Fucking disgusting.

Due to tesco clubcard vouchers I basically got this game for free and seeing that framerate analysis has absolutely ruined my excitement to even play it. That plus the micro transactions. I think it's about time to put Assassins Creed to bed for me, until Ubisoft sort their shit out.

One of my favourite franchises run to the ground by pure greed it seems.

While this franchise is pretty much lost to me as well at this point....there can be no darkness without light. In this case, ironically, it's a game which takes place in the land of shadow.

Shadow of Mordor, pretty much came out of nowhere and considering how well it did it's bound to get sequels taking place elsewhere in Middle Earth. If you haven't played it already, you really should consider it. It's about 20h worth of fun pretty much - I highly recommend it.
 

HardRojo

Member
And now I remember that AC Unity video in which they proudly announced this project involved 10 different teams. How can you be proud about that with a result like this?
 

nictron

Member
Can't we all just unite and agree that the game is poorly developed without measuring the phallus of a preferred console?

Game sucks?

Game sucks.
 

shandy706

Member
Here's a couple things I remember seeing.

_1413433982.jpg



I'm not even sure if the above image is applicable in any way....there was this quote though...



Technically we’re CPU-bound. The GPUs are really powerful, obviously the graphics look pretty good, but it’s the CPU [that] has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen, all these systems running in parallel.
We were quickly bottlenecked by that and it was a bit frustrating, because we thought that this was going to be a tenfold improvement over everything AI-wise, and we realised it was going to be pretty hard. It’s not the number of polygons that affect the framerate. We could be running at 100fps if it was just graphics, but because of AI, we’re still limited to 30 frames per second.- Ubisoft
 

Eusis

Member
Ubisoft is the first studio that managed to make an inferior version of a game on platform with around 40% more raw power : I mean just WOW.
We've always had shoddy ports on hardware that should be able to crush a game, the most extreme examples are ostensibly retro games put on newer consoles but with all sorts of performance issues.

This is probably one of the oddest though, those cases are usually due to either emulation (which will never hold up to programing a game natively to the hardware) or completely different architectures that can be a pain to convert to even though in theory you could go further. Although, I guess the GPGPU thing could be a prime example of that sort of fundamental difference that could in theory go further, but in practice is a pain to use.

Honestly, I think I'm mainly more upset by the fact they so quickly sacrificed a stable 30 fps in favor of trying to push things harder than the consoles can handle. I guess it just reinforces how this game's a parody of recent trends, but fuck's sake we're into a new generation, we should be raising the minimum back up to 30 rather than going "eh let's see how much we can get in that 20-30" range. It's definitely gotten increasingly less meaningful with each generation, 20s was more than acceptable when it got us games like Ocarina of Time, but this time around it's... extremely dense crowds? That might be a bit too much of a pain to deal with just for navigation, nevermind performance.
 

Conduit

Banned
That's the point I'm trying to make, it's not that simple. These GPUs are largely the same, Ps4 has more execution units, but they have lots of the same hardware in it. And al of those run faster on xbone due the higher clock.

Nope ( and the rest of your post is pretty wrong ).

Xbox-One-and-Playstation-4-APU-side-by-side-comparison.png
 
While this franchise is pretty much lost to me as well at this point....there can be no darkness without light. In this case, ironically, it's a game which takes place in the land of shadow.

Shadow of Mordor, pretty much came out of nowhere and considering how well it did it's bound to get sequels taking place elsewhere in Middle Earth. If you haven't played it already, you really should consider it. It's about 20h worth of fun pretty much - I highly recommend it.

Played it, completed it, loved every second of it.

This year so far has been full of surprise hits for me and most of the AAA games I was interested in have been super disappointing. Alien Isolation, Mordor, Wolfenstein to name a few surpises. Unity, Destiny, Watch Dogs to name a few disappointing ones.
 

vesvci

Banned
While this franchise is pretty much lost to me as well at this point....there can be no darkness without light. In this case, ironically, it's a game which takes place in the land of shadow.

Shadow of Mordor, pretty much came out of nowhere and considering how well it did it's bound to get sequels taking place elsewhere in Middle Earth. If you haven't played it already, you really should consider it. It's about 20h worth of fun pretty much - I highly recommend it.

Hmm, I've been hearing good things about this game. I think I'll pick it up at BB on BF...it's $25, I believe.
 

LordOfChaos

Member
I know. You're the one introducing the % math, not me... I know my maths hence the total lack of percentage in my post so hold on your high horses, we both agree.

An increase in the clock speed spreads on each core, ideally increasing their IPS by the same amount. This is cumulative on a per core basis, not the overall CPU percentage improvement obviously. I don't understand why you felt necessary to introduce that notion...

You saying per core threw me off. Though you're still saying it now, so I'm still not sure where you're sitting.


This-
Shouldn't we take into account that there are 8 cores? A 0.15 Ghz bonus per core should be useful in a CPU bound situation. No?

Definitely made it sound as if you were one of the many who thought the clock increase should be multiplied by the core count, which is plain silly when comparing it to competition with the same core count. And that's what we're doing, comparing the framerates of the two competitors here, and trying to figure out why there is such a difference.
 

Ateron

Member
What's curious for me is Why Sony has reserved 2 CPU cores for the OS, the same as M.S.. It makes sense for M.S. but I would imagine only 1 core reserved for Sony would be enough. Also it would free up more CPU resource.

Well, I think Sony doesn't want the same situation the ps3 went through to repeat itself, so they were pretty conservative in regards to OS resource allocation. They don't want to miss out on big features like party chat, and the like. Anyhow, even if the x1 cpu is faster (and we have confirmed developers stating otherwise on this very forum), it wouldn't be enough to cause this disparity. Add this to the fact that it's fucking Ubisoft programming this thing (which already explains a lot) and it's an open world with thousands of npcs on screen, so it's not exactly easy to replicate the same exact situation twice on both systems. Maybe they didn't spend so much time optimizing on ps4 because it could reach their shitty target faster, got there and decided to stop working on it whilst improving on the x1. Who knows?

All we know is that there is a power differential, shown over and over again throughout the full year these consoles have been around. It's been confirmed by devs and acknowledged by DF (even though it seems it pains them to confirm it everytime, they resort to: between the two consoles ps4 is better but play on pc cause it's the best console. or something). It's astounding how they managed to mangle this game to this point.
 

Paganmoon

Member
To be honest the way the PS4 OS is running right now I think it needs al the power it can get. My messages take so long to send I swear Yodel could courier them faster.

TBH, that's got fuck all to do with the OS, and all to do with PSN, takes ages to send and receive on the PS app on the phone as well.
 

TyrantII

Member
Honestly, I think I'm mainly more upset by the fact they so quickly sacrificed a stable 30 fps in favor of trying to push things harder than the consoles can handle. I guess it just reinforces how this game's a parody of recent trends, but fuck's sake we're into a new generation, we should be raising the minimum back up to 30 rather than going "eh let's see how much we can get in that 20-30" range. It's definitely gotten increasingly less meaningful with each generation, 20s was more than acceptable when it got us games like Ocarina of Time, but this time around it's... extremely dense crowds? That might be a bit too much of a pain to deal with just for navigation, nevermind performance.

I think as the generation wears on well find this to be an issue more of developer practices and their engine, rather than the hardware being at fault.

Ubi trying to apply their assembly line game production to a new, untested current gen engine is probably mostly to blame. What works for a proven engine for last gen probably isn't going to work this gen. At least right away.
 
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