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AC Unity PC/Nvidia Exclusive Effects Leaked

Crossing Eden

Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Tesselation
NVIDIA-Maxwell-GM204-Press-Slides-54.jpg

NVIDIA-Maxwell-GM204-Press-Slides-56.jpg

NVIDIA-Maxwell-GM204-Press-Slides-55.jpg


Contact Hardening Shadows
NVIDIA-Maxwell-GM204-Press-Slides-52.jpg

NVIDIA-Maxwell-GM204-Press-Slides-53.jpg


TXAA
NVIDIA-Maxwell-GM204-Press-Slides-51.jpg


HBAO+
NVIDIA-Maxwell-GM204-Press-Slides-49.jpg


So this beautiful game will look even more beautiful on PC. More slides can be found here.
http://videocardz.com/52552/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-and-gtx-970-press-slides-pictures-charts

DISCLAIMER:TXAA is nvidia exclusive.
 

rnaud

Member
Well, a good reason to go GTX 970 I guess.

What is the reason again why these effects are exclusive to Nvidia cards?
 

greyskull

Member
Is it normal to have Nvidia exclusive effects in games? Or am I reading the title wrong?

Sorta. I don't get the tessellation, but there's been PhysX for a long time, TXAA in more recent times. AMD has TressFX off the top of my head. The manufacturer's each have their feature sets that sometimes get showcased, usually due to money involved.
 
This doesn't seem to be a tessellation effect, I think it's POM ( parallax occlusion mapping).

You could use either. The insinuation here is that they've used tessellation because Nvidia's libraries have made it easier for artists to do so.

Normally POM and tessellation require a lot of effort from artists.
 
It's from an official Nvidia release so they'd know I guess.

Good to see more options really. The link shows some nice shadows (Far Cry 4 I think)on another game.

But yeah, agree on that roof looking bad. It seems to be a timber or stone tile, yet with tessellation the tiles look like bubbles.
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
This PC graphics exclusivity is worse than the crap happening on consoles. This is coming from a loyal nvidia fan and future owner of nvidia GPU's.
 

Corpsepyre

Banned
Tessellation is an NVIDIA effect? Didn't know that. I always switch it on, and I have an AMD R9 series card. Does it work properly with AMD? I DO get a sizable performance hit in games like Tomb Raider with it turned on.
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
It is obviously notable that the game looks pretty good with the effects though. PC gamers win in the end but not if you have to have a certain brand of GPU to enjoy said effects.
 

Chobel

Member
You could use either. The insinuation here is that they've used tessellation because Nvidia's libraries have made it easier for artists to do so.

Normally POM and tessellation require a lot of effort from artists.

So tessellation can work as an alternative to POM? I had no idea you can use tessellation to do that.
 
Nice to have, but I still have pretty serious doubts that Ubi is going to deliver a game that runs smoothly on PC even without the Nvidia exclusive bells and whistles.
 
I said it in another nVidia thread:

Tessellated ground surfaces are illusion breaking because feet clip with them. Dragon Age II is a hilarious example of this; just walk around anywhere in the main city with tessellation and you suddenly have feet swallowed up by the tile. The roof in that screenshot looks like poop with tessellation anyway. The effect should be left to walls and other doodads that deserve to be more detailed and aren't stepped upon.

fdsa-1.jpg
 

UnrealEck

Member
PCSS is a framerate killer when there's a bunch of things on-screen. Like busy city areas shown in one of those screenshots. It does add to the realism though.
I think HBAO+ is a must-have.

Can't believe there's people saying they can't see much difference lol.
 
I said it in another nVidia thread:

Tessellated ground surfaces are illusion breaking because feet clip with them. Dragon Age II is a hilarious example of this; just walk around anywhere in the main city with tessellation and you suddenly have feet swallowed up by the tile. The roof in that screenshot looks like poop with tessellation anyway. The effect should be left to walls and other doodads that deserve to be more detailed and aren't stepped upon.

fdsa-1.jpg

To prevent this you are supposed to do negative displacement. The dragon age guys are idiots.
 
Meanwhile Watch Dogs still stutters like a Mofo on the newest GPU tech. (Maxwell). Never again will I buy an Ubisoft PC release without impressions.
 
I think Ubisoft needs to focus more on delivering a well optimized and fully functional PC port rather than touting 2 or 3 exclusive nvidia features that will tank the frame-rate. ACIV's fog physx were a disaster. Plus ensuring that their servers can withstand the launch day demand and traffic would be nice too, considering lots of people couldn't play Watch_Dogs the day it launched.

Then again we're talking about Ubisoft and we're talking about PC so a brief glance at history should be a gentle reminder to potential buyers. On top of that I just remembered that they're actually attempting to launch AC: Unity, Far Cry 4 and The Crew all in the span of one week...

Good luck,
 

Bizzquik

Member
Meanwhile Watch Dogs still stutters like a Mofo on the newest GPU tech. (Maxwell). Never again will I buy an Ubisoft PC release without impressions.

So....you don't believe this?
(LoL you should NOT; they say this every year!!)

Ubisoft promises to do better by PC gamers
Andy Chalk at 13:16 on 14 August 2014

Ubisoft's relationship with PC gamers has been strained for years. Always-on DRM, last-minute delays of PC releases, its insistence on uPlay and CEO Yves Guillemot's stated belief that nine out of ten PC gamers are filthy pirates have collectively made it a difficult publisher to love. But it promises that things are different now.

"We recognize the importance and needs of PC gamers, and want to continue to improve how we create and support games for PC," Alain Corre, the executive director of Ubisoft EMEA, told MCV. "As a percentage of our business, PC grew last year, from 11 per cent in 2012/13 to 15 per cent in 2013/14, which is an indication of the progress we’re making."

That is perhaps a slightly simplistic way of looking at the situation, but the bottom line is that the PC's relevance as a game platform is actually increasing and that's something Ubisoft can't afford to ignore. Corre cited the change from always-on DRM to one-time activations, which he described as "a standard practice in the industry," as just one example of the company listening and responding to its fans.

"We’re also doing our best to bring our games to PC at the same time as the console versions. Assassin’s Creed Unity and Far Cry 4, for example, will be released simultaneously on console and PC, and this will continue to be the goal for all our major titles," he said. "Finally, we are committed to improving the optimization of our games for each platform on which they’re released – including PC."

It sounds good, but words are easy, and given Ubisoft's well-established history of delaying the PC releases of its games at the last minute—consider Driver: San Francisco, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, From Dust, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, Assassin's Creed Revelations and Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag—I think I'll wait a bit and see how things pan out before I offer any congratulations on a job well done.​

http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/08/14/ubisoft-promises-to-do-better-by-pc-gamers/
 
That's easily fixed by moving generated geometry inwards rather than outwards though, at least for the usual "cobblestone" use case.

That AC roof photo shows the geometry pushing outwards; even the hand that is hanging on has a lot more clipping than the non-tessellated shot. Imagine what that roof is going to do to feet.
 

BeforeU

Oft hope is born when all is forlorn.
fail. I mean common, exclusive effect? and the difference is not even noticeable.
 

Akai__

Member
Looks like they ran the game on medium and enabled those features. Maybe they did that on purpose to show the difference between PS4/Xbox One and PC.
 

RayMaker

Banned
roof tiles without tessellation = good quality non crooked roof tiles

roof tiles with tessellation - crooked ruff as hell ghetto roof tiles

I think the ones with out tessellation look more realistic.
 

Freeman

Banned
Fuck Nvidia, this sort of thing sucks for PC.

Not that I care for this in particular, its just not the way things should be done.
 
The only Nvidia-exclusive effect there is TXAA. The rest will run on AMD cards reasonably well (tessellation is the only one I think won't work so good, but that's only if they decide to go HAM on it).

HBAO+ and PCSS run plenty well on AMD cards. Or at least, they didn't cause issues for me in Black Flag (they didn't cause issues, but the game still ran like shit tho).
 
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