• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

Assassin's Creed Syndicate PC Performance Thread

Okay so, uncapped my frame rate, same settings as before except for shadows changed to high and environmental quality to very high. Also installed the the beta driver. Only still in Evie's introductory mission so this might be kind of irrelevant, so far the frame rate generally fluctuates in the mid-70s to low/mid 90s except cut scenes where it drops into the upper 50s, are they switching to higher quality assets/lighting and animations for them? Not really noticeable for me on my LG 144Hz monitor though admittedly I'm tempted to just lock it at 30 or 36 FPS and turn stuff up a bit but I'll see what happens when I actually get to free roam.


If there was a patch I didn't see it.
 
jorimt said:
No, if I turn off PCSS entirely, and stick with FXAA only I can get an average 60 fps @1080p. What I'm saying is, if you want to max the thing out (and get even close to a decent amount of AA coverage in this sub-pixel minefield of a game), you'll need to lock it to 30 for a consistent experience.

Again, I'm not saying it looks bad, and unlike Unity, the memory management seems to have been heavily improved, it just surprising that it's so demanding at max settings, even more so than Unity.
Click to expand...

Can't you use 2xMSAA+smaa? I was able to do this in Unity and got a solid 60 fps (980 Ti). Disappointing if this game runs worse than Unity.

But if it's just PCSS then I don't think it's fair to blame the game for being unoptimized, it's the setting that's unoptimized
 
10k said:
My 980Ti and 4.2GHz 3770k should run this at 1440p60 ultra no problem, hopefully.
Click to expand...

Well you wont have poor SLI scaling like I do currently with this game using 2 x 970 (~ 980Ti speeds with decent scaling), but you will have to turn down shadows to high to maintain 60 FPS, PCSS is too huge of hit when you get to the open city. Also, don't expect to be able to set AA settings very high and maintain a constant 60 fps, I ended up dropping down to FXAA only to maintain this. So you should be able to run everything at ultra for 1440p 60 fps aside from shadows and AA.
 
I was playing a bit more with AC Syndicate and only way i can play game without crashing is when i set UPlay Client in offline mode. i even moved game to other HDD, verified files 10 times, deleted exe file and downloaded it again, tried admin mode and nothing helped. So for now i will need to play game in offline mode or not play it at all :(

Good thing about AC Syndicate is that recognizes DS4 gamepad without DS4Windows. And everything works :D Also as i thought i like banter between Evie and Jacob, gameplay is refined and i am enjoying running around.

But man do they need to change/rewrite stream portion of their engine. I looked at some screens on Ultra settings and everything is nice X meters in-font of character but after that it is awful. Far Cry games, Watch_Dogs even The Crew have better streaming tech and longer texture draw distance.

All in all if i ignore huge issue that is mandatory offline mode to be able to play game i am ok with performance on my old GTX 760 2GB version.
 
PCSS completely annihilates my framerate, as it did in Unity (understandably so considering what that option does). Haven't had any issues with the game so far, hopefully it'll stay that way.
 
Anyone got a concensus from a GTX 780?

Only need 30 FPS at 1440p. I like to chill with a gamepad so that's a fine FPS for me.
 
I think I should get 45+ with an i7 5820k 4.2ghz, 16gb ram and a Gtx 980ti at 1440p without pcss. I don't really like pccs to be honest, I will gladly turn it off. Any people with similar systems and fxaa + pccss off? What's your performance like?
 
Seems to run pretty well for me. I'm playing on a Lenovo Y50 laptop at 900p with everything at High/Ultra High (no PCSS and using just HBAO+, not ultra) and getting a solid 30fps with occasional drops to 26 or so in huge open areas. On my home PC, I was getting upward of 60fps in the prologue with HBAO+ Ultra on at 1080p.

The cutscenes are mid-to-low 20s on the laptop most times when up close to characters, and I'm pretty sure it's because of the depth of field. Unity had the same problem, but you could turn off the Bloom or whatever and that disabled the DOF. Is there an option in the ini for that here?
 
wanderingprostheyltite said:
True stress test seems to be once you unlock the Big Ben area. I was getting locked 30 in first few on a 970, once I did the first mission in that region I started getting drops to mid to low 20s :/

Gonna get the new drivers and see if performance improves.

Speaking of, in the past I always manually uninstalled drivers for new ones, does GeForce experience properly uninstall prior drivers before installing new ones or just write on top?
Click to expand...

I suspect my framerate will not be stable in some places, like it is the case for any open world game I've ever played. Achieving a "locked" 60fps is not possible, I can deal with drops below 60 just fine though so as long as they don't overstate their welcome.

Oh, and the game defaults to the same amount of AF as on consoles, so force 16xAF in your driver panel.

EDIT : Once again we see superb scaling :
xcM4BCV.jpg

oYLpybY.jpg


A much lower clocked 8 cores / 16 threads doing better than faster clocked ones. Very interesting difference between I5 and I7 Sandys.
 
So the game seems to be a good port? I knkw the game has bugs but i mean it performance wise, I've only play about 2 hours and it seemed stable for me, miles ahead of unity when it launched
 
The Janitor said:
Can't you use 2xMSAA+smaa? I was able to do this in Unity and got a solid 60 fps (980 Ti). Disappointing if this game runs worse than Unity.

But if it's just PCSS then I don't think it's fair to blame the game for being unoptimized, it's the setting that's unoptimized
Click to expand...

Ah, but I never said it was unoptimized, I said it was demanding; the Nvidia performance guide clearly states a 980 Ti is needed for 1080p max settings at a 30 fps target framerate.

And yes, it is more demanding than Unity so far with equivalent settings. Even the normal PCSS setting in Syndicate appears to be at least 1.5X as demanding as the same setting in Unity. Also, Syndicate's FXAA solution seems to be downgraded from Unity's, which had a temporal element.

That said, I'm still very early in (only on Evie's intro level), so my impressions could easily change on the performance as I get further in.
 
Finished the Evie section of the introduction and just got into London where I'll do this again after a bit. This is from being outside, I think I stopped it just before going indoors. There might've been a few spots where I had the game paused but even then the frame rate didn't stay consistent. Tempted to lock it at 60 again and see what happens.

Again:
1080p
EQ: Very High
TQ: High
SQ: High
AO: HBAO+
AA: FXAA

i5 2500k@4.5GHz.
EVGA GTX 970 SSC @ 1417MHz
RAM 16GB@1866MHz.
Installed on my Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SSD.
ltEFmfQ.png
Click to expand...

Also forgot I wanted to enable AFx16 in the NVIDIA control panel. When I get done with what I'm doing now I'm gonna lock it back to 60.
 
Game is absolutely gorgeous. I really hope they fix the 30fps cape physics, it's the only visual blemish imo.
14497733270994681856_hkobk.png

14497733270994681856_ohp1c.png

14497733270994681856_4gq1t.png

14497733270994681856_4drcz.png

14497733270994681856_7oq13.png
Click to expand...
I'm loving Evie. Unity was honestly so bad that I thought I'd never care about this franchise again. So far I'm really enjoying this entry, such a pleasant surprise!
 
Kezen said:
I suspect my framerate will not be stable in some places, like it is the case for any open world game I've ever played. Achieving a "locked" 60fps is not possible, I can deal with drops below 60 just fine though so as long as they don't overstate their welcome.

Oh, and the game defaults to the same amount of AF as on consoles, so force 16xAF in your driver panel.

EDIT : Once again we see superb scaling :

A much lower clocked 8 cores / 16 threads doing better than faster clocked ones. Very interesting difference between I5 and I7 Sandys.
Click to expand...

Very interesting stuff. I think it might be time for me finally upgrade from my i5 2500k. I imagine only more and more games will be taking advantage of more cores and threads.
 
Zefah said:
Very interesting stuff. I think it might be time for me finally upgrade from my i5 2500k. I imagine only more and more games will be taking advantage of more cores and threads.
Click to expand...
Yes, especially with DX12. Your I5 will still do the job really, but the incentive to upgrade is greater now than it was 2-3 years ago.
 
Durante said:
It's not Ubisoft's fault that people don't understand the value of forward-looking options.
Click to expand...

Right, but it surprises me (perhaps even shocks) that the first real game to include many "forward-looking options" in this hardware generation would be an AC game ;p

The 980 Ti just came out a few months ago, and we're already seeing an AAA game that necessitates a 30 fps lock for max settings...at 1080p...(granted w/4x TXAA/MSAA and very high-res PCSS shadows).

*sigh*
 
jorimt said:
Right, but it surprises me (perhaps even shocks) that the first real game to include many "forward-looking options" in this hardware generation would be an AC game ;p

The 980 Ti just came out a few months ago, and we're already seeing an AAA game that necessitates a 30 fps lock for max settings...at 1080p...(granted w/4x TXAA/MSAA and very high-res PCSS shadows).

*sigh*
Click to expand...

It has always been the case. If you push settings and AA high enough it is a foregone conclusion that even the best hardware available can struggle. The 980ti is an extremely capable card, and the fact that it can fail to "max out" current games is not proof of the contrary.

In the same way 2016 multiplats (yes, well optimized ones) will stress even the next Pascal flagship.

The nature of PC gaming.

As I explained in another thread the hardware simply cannot keep up with the brillant minds behind the best software of today. The people behind the best looking PC games are not limited by laws of physics and can let their imagination run wild on the right hardware. No doubt they are already well aware of workloads not even conceivable on the highest-end 2016 GPUs.
 
jorimt said:
Right, but it surprises me (perhaps even shocks) that the first real game to include many "forward-looking options" in this hardware generation would be an AC game ;p

The 980 Ti just came out a few months ago, and we're already seeing an AAA game that necessitates a 30 fps lock for max settings...at 1080p...(granted w/4x TXAA/MSAA and very high-res PCSS shadows).

*sigh*
Click to expand...

The most disappointing thing (to me) here is that given to a good studio that does good PC ports or frankly a studio that just does PC first, this game would sing. But it's the same old Highvoltage/Iron Galaxy/Ubisoft Kiev story; publishers cheap out and hand these games to studios that quite frankly have no business doing that job.

EDIT - Can't seem to find who actually ported Syndicate, Kiev's page only goes up to Rogue. Perhaps it's all indeed made in house by Quebec, but then it might mean they need to get better. Either way, this game feels to me like AC4 did coming off of a disappointing AC3; I'm enjoying it a lot.
 
ithorien said:
The most disappointing thing (to me) here is that given to a good studio that does good PC ports or frankly a studio that just does PC first, this game would sing. But it's the same old Highvoltage/Iron Galaxy/Ubisoft Kiev story; publishers cheap out and hand these games to studios that quite frankly have no business doing that job.

EDIT - Can't seem to find who actually ported Syndicate, Kiev's page only goes up to Rogue.
Click to expand...

I don't think any studio can magically make MSAA on a modern game engine not be demanding.
 
ithorien said:
The most disappointing thing (to me) here is that given to a good studio that does good PC ports or frankly a studio that just does PC first, this game would sing. But it's the same old Highvoltage/Iron Galaxy/Ubisoft Kiev story; publishers cheap out and hand these games to studios that quite frankly have no business doing that job.

EDIT - Can't seem to find who actually ported Syndicate, Kiev's page only goes up to Rogue. Perhaps it's all indeed made in house by Quebec, but then it might mean they need to get better.
Click to expand...

I agree that when it comes to Ubisoft, PC is an after thought. It's great that they added way more options players were looking for with the PC version. Though, when it comes down to it, I think they are just out of the loop with the PC community. A perfect example was just a couple minutes ago on their stream when they were talking about the framerate and how they haven't seen it drop anywhere below 30fps on the machine they were playing on, like it was a good thing. To be fair though, 30fps was their goal on PC and they seemed to of hit it.
 
scitek said:
I don't think any studio can magically make MSAA on a modern game engine not be demanding.
Click to expand...

Well I don't necessarily mean wave a magic wand and fix everything; I just mean that historically with these games that have had these issues, it seems to be a severe lack of knowledge/talent in the studios that handled porting them. Obviously we'd also all prefer that these things were built PC first then dumbed down later, but next I'll be asking for world peace.
 
ithorien said:
The most disappointing thing (to me) here is that given to a good studio that does good PC ports or frankly a studio that just does PC first, this game would sing. But it's the same old Highvoltage/Iron Galaxy/Ubisoft Kiev story; publishers cheap out and hand these games to studios that quite frankly have no business doing that job.

EDIT - Can't seem to find who actually ported Syndicate, Kiev's page only goes up to Rogue. Perhaps it's all indeed made in house by Quebec, but then it might mean they need to get better. Either way, this game feels to me like AC4 did coming off of a disappointing AC3; I'm enjoying it a lot.
Click to expand...

You could say that about any game though - everything would run better behind technically proficient studios. All things considered this runs fairly well outside of the cloth animations. The PS4 version could barely hold 30fps half the time at 900p, so this is already a huge upgrade.
 
Garrett Hawke said:
Yeah the main issues seem to be PCSS and power-hungry AA solutions. Not sure what anyone else would be able to do.
Click to expand...

I don't mind having to lower or disable PCSS to achieve the target 60 fps. My main gripe with this game is that beyond TXAA, they aren't providing any good, affordable AA option this time around. As I said in my last post, the FXAA in this version seems to be inferior to the FXAA in Unity, which did a decent job of eliminating sub-pixel shimmering in motion with its custom temporal element. It may just be my imagination, but Syndicate seems to be missing this, and it suffers for it.

If this game was full of cornfields instead of cityscapes with sub-pixel details everywhere, its FXAA solution would be just fine, but that sadly isn't the case.

I'm an IQ nut, so max settings, 30 fps cap, TXAA 4X, and SweetFX sharpening it is for now.
 
I have to cap the fps to 30 because its too taxing to play on my i5-2500k. I'm always at 90-100% cpu usage while roaming.

THlp9SL.png
 
leng jai said:
You could say that about any game though - everything would run better behind technically proficient studios. All things considered this runs fairly well outside of the cloth animations. The PS4 version could barely hold 30fps half the time at 900p, so this is already a huge upgrade.
Click to expand...

Oh I absolutely agree. My most recent edit of the above comment I'm pretty clear; I'm enjoying this game a lot and it's very refreshing to almost have it, for the lack of a better term, return to form.
 
Getting super shitty performance on jacob's tutorial as well as some weird stuttering.

I have everything maxed (TXAAx2 for AA) on 1080p with:

I7 5820K
16GB DDR4
Strix GTX980

Do we know what's killing performance? I have to go now so can't run tests but I expected much better after hearing it was paired down from unity :S (which btw runs flawlessly)

I'll be back and test some more in a couple of hours :S (also super fucking bummed that you have to restart the game every time you change the settings, takes ages to go through all the fucking logos -__-)
 
Innolis said:
Getting super shitty performance on jacob's tutorial as well as some weird stuttering.

I have everything maxed (TXAAx2 for AA) on 1080p with:

I7 5820K
16GB DDR4
Strix GTX980

Do we know what's killing performance? I have to run now so can't run tests but I expected much better after hearing it was paired down from unity :S (which btw runs flawlessly)
Click to expand...

It would be great if you could post your settings. Your performance could be very good or very bad depending on what you have selected.

Basically, HBAO+ ultra and both variants PCSS require top-end systems which the 980 is not. MSAA also carries a very significant performance hit but you probably already knew that.

Your best chance to hit 60fps in most cases is to go with high shadows, FXAA and HBAO+. I have a 980 and while the early segments run great I'm positive the 60fps will not be 100% sustained, it very rarely has been on my PC in complex open world games.
 
ithorien said:
The most disappointing thing (to me) here is that given to a good studio that does good PC ports or frankly a studio that just does PC first, this game would sing. But it's the same old Highvoltage/Iron Galaxy/Ubisoft Kiev story; publishers cheap out and hand these games to studios that quite frankly have no business doing that job.
Click to expand...

Oh really now? Can you in anyway prove that?
 
So just stopped playing and I got the patch to 1.12. Going to turn on AFx16 and do some more running around White Chapel with the frame rate Vsynced to 60 via RTSS and see how that goes.


While sparse in graphic options it's no where near Arkham Knight, this is a completely competent port at least so far.
 
Alright, finally got past the intros and into the city. The size of the city is very impressive; the draw distance looks to have been increased (the low-res building issue from Unity seems to have been remedied as well, for the most part); the lighting, while not GI, is now dynamic and not baked (like Unity's); and unlike Unity, there's nary a stutter to be seen, even on an HDD. The memory usage is also excellent.

After a little tinkering, it appears on my 980 Ti/4770k @4.2, I can get a locked 60 fps @1080p, all Ultra, but for AA (FXAA), and Shadows at Very High. Or I can get a locked 30 fps all at Ultra, TXAA 4X included @1080p.

Again, It is more demanding than Unity with equivalent settings, and I still think the FXAA solution is inferior to Unity's, and wish they had included a TAA similar to Fallout 4's, but otherwise this appears to be a solid port.
 
ithorien said:
The most disappointing thing (to me) here is that given to a good studio that does good PC ports or frankly a studio that just does PC first, this game would sing. But it's the same old Highvoltage/Iron Galaxy/Ubisoft Kiev story; publishers cheap out and hand these games to studios that quite frankly have no business doing that job.

EDIT - Can't seem to find who actually ported Syndicate, Kiev's page only goes up to Rogue. Perhaps it's all indeed made in house by Quebec, but then it might mean they need to get better. Either way, this game feels to me like AC4 did coming off of a disappointing AC3; I'm enjoying it a lot.
Click to expand...

Hey now lets not shit on Iron Galaxy. I seriously doubt AK PC was their fault
 
Kezen said:
It would be great if you could post your settings. Your performance could be very good or very bad depending on what you have selected.

Basically, HBAO+ ultra and both variants PCSS require top-end systems which the 980 is not. MSAA also carries a very significant performance hit but you probably already knew that.

Your best chance to hit 60fps in most cases is to go with high shadows, FXAA and HBAO+. I have a 980 and while the early segments run great I'm positive the 60fps will not be 100% sustained, it very rarely has been on my PC in complex open world games.
Click to expand...

I should've clarified but I meant "maxed" in a literal way as in, every single setting except AA maxed.

I guess I didn't expect PCSS and the Higher settings for HBAO+ to be so demanding!
 
If you have a GTX 770 2GB. You can get around 35-45fps with the following settings (Which is great if you have a gsync monitor):
Code: 
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/UEpqoLS.png[/IMG]
 
Why are do the cutscenes run so bad? They struggle along at 47fps half the time. 60fps seems feasible on my 2500k/970 setup as long as you don't use HBAO Ultra or PCSS or MSAA. Even 2x MSAA tanks the 10fps+
 
after more time with the game i had to scale back to HBAO+ and shadows on high to get a completely locked 60, PCSS while it looks nice is too taxing at the moment, im playing at 1080p

GTX 980ti
16 gigs of ram
i7 2600k @ 4.5
windows 7
ssd
 
The game is actually remarkably stable I've found once in London compared to most AC games, where it felt like wandering into the wrong area would tax me 10-15 FPS depending on the scenery.
 
leng jai said:
Why are do the cutscenes run so bad? They struggle along at 47fps half the time. 60fps seems feasible on my 2500k/970 setup as long as you don't use HBAO Ultra or PCSS or MSAA. Even 2x MSAA tanks the 10fps+
Click to expand...

If it's like Unity, I think the cutscenes switch to using much higher quality models and post processing effects.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Assassins Creed Black Flag - PC Via Game Pass
8
533
simpatico replied
  • Locked
Switch 2 - Assassin's Creed Shadows - Dec 2
1
194
DeafTourette replied
  • Poll
Assassin's Creed: Shadows versus Red Dead Redemtion2
2
51
801
Hudo replied
Assassin's Creed Shadows: Nintendo Switch 2 Launch Trailer
Trailer Platform 
4
155
Gonzito replied
Ubisoft reveals ray tracing performance numbers for Assassin's Creed Shadows (DF Direct)
2 3
132
5K
poppabk replied
Top Bottom