Digital Foundry : AC:Syndicate PC face-off
- Thread starter icecold1983
- Start date
thats what i thought. i enjoyed unity's technical aspect. it was a gorgeous game and had a lot of details. the ambtion was there, but the limitations were obvious.
i am a graphics whore to a very large extent and thats one of the reasons i bought unity and did not buy syndicate, ac in general does not intrigue me, but i am all for th eye candy.
i am a graphics whore to a very large extent and thats one of the reasons i bought unity and did not buy syndicate, ac in general does not intrigue me, but i am all for th eye candy.
Dictator93
Member
The downgrade regarding NPC density is palpable. 30fps cloth physics are also sad 
But at least the 750Ti is offering better than console visual/performance according to them. Which I find surprising given the 2GB of VRAM.
But at least the 750Ti is offering better than console visual/performance according to them. Which I find surprising given the 2GB of VRAM.
They didn't specifically downgrade the PC version.
They downgraded their entire vision for what a next-gen AC is from the outset, after they simply couldn't get Unity to work acceptably on consoles.
They couldn't get Unity to work acceptably anywhere, the bugs in all versions caused them a shitstorm of bad PR.
They couldn't get Unity to work acceptably anywhere, the bugs in all versions caused them a shitstorm of bad PR.
It performs great on 780/970 grade GPUs though, at 1080p.
Aside from the 30fps cloth the PC version is excellent, a very significant leap over any console versions on high-end hardware.
icecold1983
Member
The downgrade regarding NPC density is palpable. 30fps cloth physics are also sad
But at least the 750Ti is offering better than console visual/performance according to them. Which I find surprising given the 2GB of VRAM.
the biggest letdown is how much worse lighting, shading and materials look. aa coverage for msaa/txaa is also noticeably worse. HBAO+ looks worse, unity quality seems to sit in between HBAO+ and HBAO+ ultra. PCSS performance hit is also dramatically higher than it was in unity, not to even mention PCSS ultra.
Well yea, when you have 4x the power of consoles, you can brute force it somewhere. It still ran like shit on consoles though.
He claimed the game could not run well anywhere, that's is patently false.
Brute forcing won't get you far if the game is not well optimized, Unity arguably was on PC.
It does not run as well on the PCs I've tested it on solely because of the hardware.
If you can find a single person that says Unity was well optimized on PC at launch I will be impressed.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-assassins-creed-syndicate-face-off
That said you are correct, at launch there were bugs, but as far as I can remember performance was really good on my 780. Like I could totally see why it could dip below 60fps, the game is stunning.
It only got better from there with drivers and patches, it is of course not a perfectly locked 60fps (anyone believed open world game can never drop below 60fps ?) but it runs superbly.
I got the negative climate surrounding releases like AK but strangely Unity was never a source of problems in my case. I can't remember the game crashing even once.
Bugs aside, unity was one of these cases where people saying "badly optimized" meant they couldn't push all sliders to max, instead of looking at what the game was doing.
Exactly.
980ti here - I'm especially unhappy with the AA offerings in this game, and the "forced" FXAA over either MSAA or TXAA solutions annoys me as hell. I also noticed the PCSS performance hit, which is much higher than in Unity indeed.
After several hours of testing and not getting anything that satisfied me, I ended up locking the game to 30fps.
Running the game now on 1620p, TXAA4, HBAO+ Ultra and PCSS with 30fps, and FINALLY got an image quality that satisfies me.
Unity in it's patched state performes better than Syndicate imho. I could run Unity on 1440p/60fp with PCSS on, this is impossible with Syndicate for me.
Beneficial side-effect for locking it to 30fps: the cloth physics do not look weird to me
No but it is now.
This is no excuse for the state it was when it launched, but nowadays it is much more optimized than a lot of other AAA games that came out the last years.
And it's simply beautiful
For both games, I would have LOVED if they had included a LOD slider in the PC versions for high-end machines...
I'm a little disappointed Ubisoft never released the promised tesselation for Unity...
curiouscharles
Member
yeah, i don't consider brute forcing a game "running well" myself.
my 980ti still cries trying to run Unity @ 1440p - which is kind of unacceptable?
#PCentitlementmaybe?
chromatic9
Member
Says GTX 660 is good for even 1080p at console settings. Good stuff and right inline with how good it runs.
I agree that Unity is better looking but it's an interesting trade off. One thing Unity lacked is a good amount of smoke that we saw in pre release. Syndicate has lots of it, I think down to the change. They couldn't do industrial London without lots of smoke.
I agree that Unity is better looking but it's an interesting trade off. One thing Unity lacked is a good amount of smoke that we saw in pre release. Syndicate has lots of it, I think down to the change. They couldn't do industrial London without lots of smoke.
iNvid02
Member
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=189617579
they finally acknowledged this a few days ago and said they are looking into it, i really hope they can resolve it because its jarring as hell for me.
30fps cloth physics are also sad
they finally acknowledged this a few days ago and said they are looking into it, i really hope they can resolve it because its jarring as hell for me.
chromatic9
Member
Noticed a thread was already made before this one.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1158614
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1158614
They couldn't get Unity to work acceptably anywhere, the bugs in all versions caused them a shitstorm of bad PR.
I played through the PC version back in March and it didn't act up at all aside from a single crash and brief moment in a cutscene where an NPC holding a sword suddenly disappeared. The only glaring issue (or "issue") with Unity PC these days is that it's VRAM-hungry to the point that you should leave it on the backburner if you don't have at least 3GB. Indeed, I myself gave up on the game for a few months as the 2GB ceiling of my two 670s was simply too low -- it wasn't until I upgraded to a 980 that I resumed my playthrough.
N
Noray
Unconfirmed Member
I thought Syndicate looked incredible at times so I kinda wanna go back and play Unity just for the eye candy.
That said, I feel like the narrative of "Unity was a buggy mess and Syndicate is a perfect baby" is bullshit. I've had several crashes, pathing errors, scripting errors, and all kinds of random nonsense happen in Syndicate. It just didn't have bugs that went viral and basically turned into a meme like Ascent of the Jackdaw and that hideous hair-face. It's still a buggy mess and I didn't think a particularly good game, either.
That said, I feel like the narrative of "Unity was a buggy mess and Syndicate is a perfect baby" is bullshit. I've had several crashes, pathing errors, scripting errors, and all kinds of random nonsense happen in Syndicate. It just didn't have bugs that went viral and basically turned into a meme like Ascent of the Jackdaw and that hideous hair-face. It's still a buggy mess and I didn't think a particularly good game, either.
bargeparty
Member
They couldn't get Unity to work acceptably anywhere, the bugs in all versions caused them a shitstorm of bad PR.
It annoys me that this gets posted so much and got so much attention. So many games have bugs like this, but are ignored. Ubisoft is just a big target (not completely unwarranted though).
I will just leave this code here, Get Syndicate or Rainbow 6 for free!
https://redeem.geforce.com/
BBNA-PLXO-SJYT-SACG-JQPW-MHFN
https://redeem.geforce.com/
BBNA-PLXO-SJYT-SACG-JQPW-MHFN
