Hi everyone. So yesterday we took a look at what was going wrong
with Assassin's Creed Unity based on reports that were
flooding the web at the time. Now these reports were
across the spectrum really from PlayStation 4 to Xbox One to PC.
And they all had a very common theme going on -
performance is subpar to what we were expecting and in fact what we were promised -
which was 30 frames a second.
What we're seeing in very heavy AI
areas is a drop in frame rate that is considerable.
On PlayStation it's anything up to 10 frames a second dropping down to 20.
On Xbox we're losing three to four frames a second on average.
Now it's not a uniform problem across
every scene in the game which means we can start to see where the bottleneck
is here. It does seem that artificial intelligence which is very much a CPU
bound aspect
is the bottleneck. As soon as there's a large number of NPC's,
non-player characters on-screen being governed by AI,
that's where the game starts to have a significant number of
problems. In other scenes which tend to be geometry-based or
where lighting is quite heavy that's where we're seeing smaller dips,
not as big or as wide a problem as we seem to be getting with,
well, the AI aspect. So what led to this?
Well, I think it's very easy to turn round and just say well Ubisoft people are incompetent,
and I think that's probably a lazy attribute to ascribe to them.
What I think we're actually dealing with here is some aspirations and a line
in the sand for performance.
Those things, if you kind of take
when this game had been started to be developed, when they first wrote those design
documents and said okay
we're going to go for an average of 5,000 AI routines.
If you kind of consider when they would have been looking to produce this design
document,
maybe around two years ago, maybe a little bit earlier,they would have had
to decide
what features the game was going to have. One of those features may very well have
been
a substantial increase in AI because
at that time, the performance level we were expecting from next-gen consoles
was going to be around here. Here's our metaphorical line in the sand that
developers were working to.
They had design spec documents from Sony and from Microsoft
but ultimately until you actually get the silicon in your hands and start developing
on it, that's only the point where you can actually see oh,
I think we may have over-egged our expectations here
for what these consoles were capable of. The problem then
is you're already kind of locked into a marketing cycle, you've already started talking to
reviewers
already started talking to the general public about what this game is going to
be about.
That started really nearly a year ago I think for Assassin's Creed,
long before in many respects they'd been able to work out exactly how much performance
they were going to get
out of their code, especially those AI routines.
For my mind it would seem to me that
the guys at Ubisoft put the line in the sand and then found the physical hardware
just couldn't come up to those expectations. Now
we should obviously question why they got it so wrong, why were their
expectations so out of whack with reality
but also why they then didn't start paring back when they realised there was
going to be some problems.
Well, in part, that's the marketing for you. Once you've kind of
locked in to saying you're going to have 5,000 AI and 10,000 in some scene
you're kind of going to have to do it. In part they
they may very well have found they ran out of time to do
any more optimisation work on that AI or even potentially competely change
tack and have some kind of fall back position when the CPU became bottlenecked
that the AI could become simplified in some way or could share particular AI branches
between large groups of AI on
screen thus reducing the kind of, well impact on the CPU
and the bottleneck we're seeing there. Now it's interesting as to why
effectively two very similar consoles architecturally
are both encountering a problem but the PlayStation 4
is having a bigger problem. How come?
The only thing we can really say is in the case of the Xbox One
they have ES RAM, some ultra-fast memory but
with very small amount of it. Now that might be just enough to hold these AI
calculations
away from the CPU for a little time so it can carry on processing and then drop them back in
with no bottleneck or
with a reduced level of bottleneck. It could also be
that the guys at Ubisoft are making, taking advantage of cloud
opportunities from Microsoft's Xbox One console. We saw it with Titanfall,
you can offload AI calculations to the cloud and have those returned in chunks
without a major impact in performance of the game. That may
very well be going on here with Ubisoft and the Xbox One
but I think that's unlikely because we'd probably have heard Microsoft crowing about
that a little bit
or Ubisoft saying hey, we've managed to do more calculations than Xbox One,
than we were able to do with PS4 because we've offloaded some to the cloud.
We may very well never know exactly what went wrong
for Ubisoft on this one but it does seem that developers internally
at least anecdotally were telling friends to avoid this game because
technically it wasn't working very well. Now
it's going to be interesting that's something we heard very similar coming out of
developers working on Watchdogs.
They just weren't all that impressed with what they created and were telling friends
yes skip this one, it's not a very good release. Can Ubisoft fix the mess
that they've kind of got themselves into with Assassin's Creed?
I don't think so. I think this is the game. Even patches
unless they have a radical overhaul of the way AI is computed
it's going to be like this forever.
What we have here is a game that is not fit for purpose and actually
under trading standards within the United Kingdom and the EU
if you bought this game or pre-ordered it you'd be well within your rights
to ask for a refund. Unfortunately it is not of merchantable
quality. Thanks for watching. Do please subscribe to us on YouTube and Twitch
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