Confusing Assassin’s Creed: Unity GPU Recommendations and Optimising Issues

As we’re inundated with comments about Assassins Creed: Unity barely performing above 50 FPS on low settings throughout higher end graphic card offerings from NVIDIA and AMD, we’ve taken some time out to look at NVIDIA’s recommendations as to what exactly you should purchase to run Ubisoft’s latest game.

Take a look at this table and explanation below, it mentions that Unity has some pretty demanding system requirements (we wrote about it pre-release) and suggests exactly what you should expect to run to reach smooth frame-rates at full HD – 1920 x 1080 resolution.

Now we must admit, aiming for 40 FPS is pretty poor – we suggest you should be looking at around 120 FPS minimum on any game to have a fully smooth experience. But according to this table, you should be looking at a rather nice experience running your budget grade GTX 780 Ti which will set you back a pocket change amount of $570 US in today’s market. Obviously we’re being sarcastic in this remark, and it leaves us thinking if Ubisoft spent enough time optimizing their game.

Looking at the plethora of posts on Reddits PC Master Race shows that even given these minimum system requirements, the game still isn’t properly functional. Below you can see Reddit user ElliotCarter94 using his R9 290 card coupled with a i5 3570k running at 3.8GHz, only managing to achieve 39 FPS on a 640 x 480 resolution set at the lowest graphic quality.

This is coupled with other users claiming 47-52 FPS when utilizing their GTX 760’s on low settings, among other issues of console wording being unchanged when Ubisoft went through through the process of porting it to PC.

Furthermore, if you take a quick look at NVIDIA’s apparent amazing comparisons when comparing high and low settings within Unity, they provide two total comparisons set in different environments, set to display the major difference between running high or low settings. You can see example one here, and example two here. If you look closely, you’ll find that there’s basically no difference at all – what’s up with that? On top of this fact, NVIDIA are offering free Assassins Creed: Unity copies with some of their graphic cards, which begs the question – why are they offering a game which the card wont run?

Please don’t let it end like this Ubisoft, they’ve made some great games in the past – but as of recent times, they’ve really proven that they are out of touch with the community and are seemingly dragging NVIDIA down with them.

We are currently working on securing a PR contact for Ubisoft – we will continue to report as soon this happens or as the story develops.

Cover image courtesy of eTeknix