sheeeyit mang, close call
Dear UBI: Please turn down the graphics.
TURN DOWN FOR WHAT?!?
…oh, no jank
Game is very pretty, I’ll give it that. So far it’s running OK
Home! Firing it up…
Wait, wasn’t Unity the game that was going for “parity” (which PS4 people interpreted as "dumbing the PS4 version down to match the XBO’s crappier specs)? Why would the PS4 version be worse than the XBO version given they’re similar hardware where the PS4 actually has an edge?
I could understand in the early PS3/360 days when the PS3 was a whole crazy new architecture (and the 360 was more familiar). I don’t get it now that they’re based on similar hardware. Any developer types care to enlighten those of us who just play games, rather than make them?
Good lord, the sheer amount of stutter in the church is outrageous.
Paris seems to be a wealth of possibilities, but it seems like they should have severely limited the first Segment and restricted all of the game elements until you got to Paris. Otherwise… you’re exposed to all this stuff and you just can’t do anything.
Friends tried co-op and it seems severely janky.
— Alan
They talk about this in the article. XBO has better cpu vs ps4’s better gpu. So in AC-unity, XBO has a slight edge during game play when it has to compute the AI for 50 billion frenchmen. But in cut scenes, PS4 has the lead.
In the early sections, my 2600K is using 6 cores about 50% ish. Memory usage sitting at 6GB. FPS about 30 with VSynch on and ultra or high settings and 19x12 (280x). A little popup of people and clothing. Slightly disappointing LOD on buildings and scenery. Nearby is fine, but the low res versions seem to cut in kind of quickly for a ‘next gen’ title. Early Intel SSD.
And a bit later in Paris it’s more like 8GB and a third to a half of 8 cores… at least by the time I Alt-tab out. The lowest framerate I’ve seen is 18… which is fine-ish is good looking scenes. Distant scenery is still ok-ish rather than stellar.
I’ve read the game does not take advantage of GPU compute as well
Because if that bit above was an indication, the crappy gps has to do with texture swapping, and the xbox’s bigger pool of near processor memory will help a lot with that.
Best review:
So all the bullshit about being “CPU-bound” wasn’t bullshit after all? Or are they just piling it up?
(Note: I don’t have a dog in this fight, having not purchased an Xbox One, PS4, or AC:U)
Stupid game asks for your resolution and your aspect ratio then ignores them and puts black bars top and bottom… (unless you turn on ‘Stretching’).
???
Co op is surprisingly awesome!
Got to Sequence 1, Mission 3 (PS4 version) and couldn’t play because the game hadn’t finished installing yet. Turns out I still had 10 GB to go. I suppose it’s cool that I could play while it was installing but there’s nothing in-game other than that message indicating I wasn’t fully downloaded.
And yes, AC Initiates is completely borked – It’s picking up some of my achievements but not all; Freedom Cry, for example is being ignored.
The problem was they were using the CPU performance to explain the completely unrelated choice to fix resolution of both versions at 900p. If anything, being heavily CPU bound on PS4 implies they could probably increase the resolution without impacting the frame rate.
Of course, with the performance so bad in both versions they probably should have just pulled back on their ambitions until they could maintain a stable framerate.
If it’s just a matter of CPU then a PC version should FLY. Instead it doesn’t.
It’s just a mess of an engine. Remember that Watch Dogs was substantially downgraded from what they showed for years, and it was also a technical disaster on PC. Unity just shows that the current technical level at Ubisoft is rather low.
Black Flag was also rather bad on PC. It’s not like this is the first title by Ubisoft that runs poorly. The only “new” thing is that it runs like crap on consoles /too/. And that, even if you remove completely the framerate issues, the game is overall filled with bugs, crashes and every other problem.
It’s what you expect from beta code, and it proves that the game just wasn’t even close to being ready for release.
There’s only one reason why it came out now: it’s the holiday period, all big games come out now.
