Load the Game

Large crowds are not the reason for Unity’s frame-rate issues

• Egon Kilin
• November 19th, 2014

Assassin’s Creed Unity’s publisher and developers are still struggling with patching up their latest entry in the mega-popular franchise, this resulting in yet another update on the game’s official blog. Some players have recently suggested lowering the number of NPCs displayed in any one scene, suspecting it has something to do with Unity’s frames-per-second dropping so low. Apparently, that’s not the issue. “We’ve received a lot of feedback on the performance of ACU over the past week and we’re taking it very seriously,” reads the post. “We know this is a very important issue to you and we want to see it resolved as much as you do.”

“We have just finished a new round of tests on crowd size but have found it is not linked to this problem and does not improve frame rate, so we will be leaving crowds as they are. It’s taken us some time to make progress on this front, but we’ve got some promising findings to share. We can tell you that we have detected a distinct discrepancy between what we observed in the pre-launch versus post-launch environment. In spite of our testing, it looks like the instruction queue is becoming overloaded and impacting performance.” Additionally, Ubisoft has listed three main issues because of which Unity’s FPS are all over the place:

• Streamlining some technical aspects of navigation: We’ve fixed a number of edge cases with our detection system to smooth certain behaviours during parkour. We’ve fixed a few objects which were improperly tagged to smooth navigation.
• Improving task scheduling: We’ve tuned the way the computing tasks are prioritized and parallelized by the processor cores to improve framerate in certain edge cases.
• Tweaking performance for Reach High Points: We’ve optimized the reach high points, during the camera swooping sequence to improve framerate a little bit.

Assassin’s Creed Unity is available for purchasing on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. If you’re still rocking the last-generation consoles, you could check out Assassin’s Creed Rogue, which has received a strong 8.9/10 from us. You can read our full review [here].