Ubisoft Clarifies, Assassin’s Creed Unity Issues Not AMD Specific

Khalid Moammer

Ubisoft's latest blockbuster title, Assassin's Creed Unity has had a very turbulent debut. The publisher's latest title has been afflicted by a plethora of performance issues and bugs since launch. Ubisoft had issued a statement addressing these issues a few days ago, which essentially pinned the blame on AMD for the poor performance and various visual bugs.

Assassin's Creed Unity Bugs

We published an article two days ago in which we set on to get to the bottom of Assassin's Creed Unity's issues and deal with Ubisoft's statement in particular. What's behind the various performance issues, visual glitches and bugs ? was it really down to specific AMD hardware configurations as Ubisoft had claimed ?

Upon further investigation we found out that this is not the case. As the issues plaguing the latest Assassin's Creed are imminently present no matter what your hardware configuration is. And as we found out that's actually due to some peculiar choices made by Ubisoft. But before we get into that let's take a look at Ubisoft's most recent statement first.

Ubisoft Claims The Original Statement About Game Issues In Relation To AMD Was Misinterpreted

Yesterday Ubisoft issued a new statement with regards to the on-going issues with the game.

As previously reported on the Assassin’s Creed Live Updates Blog, our team is furiously working to resolve bugs and performance issues for Assassin’s Creed Unity on all platforms. On PC, some media outlets have misinterpreted a forum post indicating that we were working on resolving issues that were AMD-specific. We apologize for any confusion and want to be clear that we are working with all of our hardware partners to address known issues that exist across various PC configurations. We care deeply about a smooth and enjoyable Assassin’s Creed experience and we will continue to update customers as these issues are fixed via the AC Live Updates Blog.

According to the publisher's latest statement, the team is actually working on resolving the issues which, as we've found out, are cross-vendor and not AMD-specific.

Like we said above, the various visual glitches, game bugs and issues can be experienced on any hardware configuration. Which is really down to the game itself rather than the hardware on which it's operating due to some unusual design choices.

The game (in its current state) is issuing approximately 50,000 draw calls on the DirectX 11 API. Problem is, DX11 is only equipped to handle ~10,000 peak draw calls. What happens after that is a severe bottleneck with most draw calls culled or incorrectly rendered, resulting in texture/NPCs popping all over the place. On the other hand, consoles have to-the-metal access and almost non-existent API Overhead but significantly underpowered hardware which is not able to cope with the stress of the multitude of polygons. Simply put, its a very very bad port for the PC Platform and an unoptimized (some would even go as far as saying, unfinished) title on the consoles.

If you're currently facing performance issues with your game a temporary fix that we've learned about might help improve things a bit. According to various reports across the web, disabling your internet connection and going offline can actually improve performance. We don't quite understand why that is yet, but it couldn't hurt to try.

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