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Unofficial response from Assassin's Creed dev on 900p drama. Bombcast 10/14/2014

Just listening to this week's Bombcast and they got an email from an Assassin's Creed/Ubisoft developer. The dev stated they would be willing to provide further proof of their position/job if needed, but the Bombcast guys felt comfortable enough reading it on air after cross checking the claims made with another developer.

This begins at about 2:25 on this week's Bomcast.

I'm going to give as close a quote as I can.

"I'm happy to enlighten you guys because way too much bullshit about 1080p making a difference is being thrown around. If the game is as pretty and fun as ours will be, who cares? Getting this game to 900p was a BITCH. The game is so huge in terms of rendering that it took months to get it to 720p at 30fps. The game was 9fps 9 months ago. We only achieved 900p at 30fps weeks ago. The PS4 couldn't handle 1080p 30fps for our game, whatever people, or Sony and Microsoft say. Yes, we have a deal with Microsoft, and yes we don't want people fighting over it, but with all the recent concessions from Microsoft, backing out of CPU reservations not once, but twice, you're talking about a 1 or 2 fps difference between the two consoles. So yes, locking the framerate is a conscious decision to keep people bullshiting, but that doesn't seem to have worked in the end. Even if Ubi has deals, the dev team members are proud, and want the best performance out of every console out there. What's hard is not getting the game to render at this point, it's making everything else in the game work at the same level of performance we designed from the start for the graphics. By the amount of content and NPCs in the game, from someone who witnessed optimization for lots of Ubisoft games in the past, this is crazily optimized for such a young generation of consoles. This really is about to define a next gen like no other game before. Mordor has next gen system and gameplay, but not graphics like Unity does. The proof comes in that game being cross gen. Our producer (Vincent) saying we're bound with AI by the CPU is right, but not entirely. Consider this, they started this game so early for next gen, MS and Sony wanted to push graphics first, so that's what we did. I believe 50% of the CPU is dedicated to helping the rendering by processing pre-packaged information, and in our case, much like Unreal 4, baked global illumination lighting. The result is amazing graphically, the depth of field and lighting effects are beyond anything you've seen on the market, and even may surpass Infamous and others. Because of this I think the build is a full 50gigs, filling the bluray to the edge, and nearly half of that is lighting data."
 

orochi91

Member
How does that explain XB1 version being at 900p as well? Shouldn't it be lower?

Isn't resolution GPU related anyways?
 

SJRB

Gold Member
"I'm happy to enlighten you guys because way too much bullshit about 1080p making a difference is being thrown around. If the game is as pretty and fun as ours will be, who cares?

Holy shit, hahaha.


Also, what the fuck at the random Mordor slam? Keep it classy, completely random and anonymous Ubisoft employee.
 
Yes, we have a deal with Microsoft, and yes we don't want people fighting over it, but with all the recent concessions from Microsoft, backing out of CPU reservations not once, but twice, you're talking about a 1 or 2 fps difference between the two consoles.

What?
 
So the dev wants us to believe the PS4 and X1 are equal hardware?

NO, he's basically backing up the fact that the CPU is the limiting factor, and in that department they are pretty much equals, although he does leave the door open for small FPS differences.

How does that explain XB1 version being at 900p as well? Shouldn't it be lower?

Isn't resolution GPU related anyways?

He's basically slapping back at the people who are claiming this, saying the CPU is involved in the rendering, and is the biggest limiting factor.
 
eKhr5Og.gif
 
The game was 9fps 9 months ago. We only achieved 900p at 30fps weeks ago.

Yeah I don't know, seems like bullshit.
As much as I like GB they've read some weird-ass sensationalist emails in the past.
 
So they're are still only talking about FPS instead of the 900p/PS4 issue?
If the Xbone can do 900p, the PS4 can do more.

"I'm happy to enlighten you guys because way too much bullshit about 1080p making a difference is being thrown around. If the game is as pretty and fun as ours will be, who cares?
lol....

So the dev wants us to believe the PS4 and X1 are equal hardware?
If they only compare the CPU's to each other, the might be right.
Resolution/GPU/RAM is a different story.
 

Piggus

Member
Still doesn't answer where the PS4's extra GPU power is going. You couldn't get the PS4 version to 1080p? Bullshit. If you can magically get the Xbone version running as well as the PS4 version then you're obviously leaving performance on the table.
 

Foshy

Member
I don't have a problem believing that they've had development problems that made 1080p impossible. I just don't think this game looks particularly good compared to other PS4/XB1 only or even cross-gen titles, which is the bigger problem considering they're touting this to be the first "true next-gen game"
 

Big_Al

Unconfirmed Member
The random jab at Mordor is pretty funny.

Even funnier in that it's not a 'cross gen' game in the traditional sense. Monolith only worked on the PS4/XBOX ONE/PC versions and that's being downported to 360/PS3 with the nemesis system being severely downgraded (if not removed entirely ?)
 
I'd sooner beleive they're programming the game poorly, considering the excuse of CPU constraints is what this is based on.

Should've seriously offloaded that on the GPU.
 
Still doesn't answer where the PS4's extra GPU power is going. You couldn't get the PS4 version to 1080p? Bullshit. If you can magically get the Xbone version running as well as the PS4 version then you're obviously leaving performance on the table.

What if they could get the PS4 version running at 45fps, but they didn't want to leave the game with a variable framerate, so it just got locked at 30?
 

JeffG

Member
How does that explain XB1 version being at 900p as well? Shouldn't it be lower?

Isn't resolution GPU related anyways?

He is just saying the PS4 just wasn't quite enough to get to 1080p

Probably Xbone runs at ~30-40fps and the PS4 runs 37-47ish at 900, so they just locked it to 30
 
So they have guerrilla PR folk now?

None of this accounts for the GPU power difference between the consoles.

If they offloaded GPU work to the CPU, they can just as easily load it back on again for the PS4...

You know how you can tell this is a planted response from Ubisoft? It pretends the two consoles have equal power.
 

Harp

Member
They need to just release a video show why the amount of next on screen is more important then IQ. From what I have seen its just more npc doing the same thing they have always was done. Completely ignoring that the player exists.
 

kenta

Has no PEINS
Suuuuuure is a lot of high talk for being this early in the console cycle. Surely nothing will surpass your video game in a year or so, mister Ubisoft

Edit: It reads as if he's saying "But we tried REALLY hard!", which is just precious. I tried really hard at Algebra in high school, too.
 

Markitron

Is currently staging a hunger strike outside Gearbox HQ while trying to hate them to death
1 console is moderately more powerful than the other.

If the game is the same on both, then the more powerful platform is not being pushed as far as it can go

It's that simple, they are treating us like idiots.
 
If that's really the case, why didn't they just say there were CPU bound and not push what is apparently just a label of parity enforcement on the two versions?
 

Alchemy

Member
If the game is as pretty and fun as ours will be, who cares?

Stopped reading here. People are fine with technical limitations, and fun games do beat out shitty ones. The problem (that many people seem to miss) is the fact that Ubisoft is sitting on unused resources for the PS4 and aiming for parity on two machines that aren't equal while trying to dance around the fucking issue.
 

Nabbis

Member
Sorry, a game can't have nextgen graphics unless it's running at the native resolution of a FullHD tv. It does not matter how Ubisoft might spin it, native resolution is the biggest thing that will determine visual fidelity.
 

ymmv

Banned
Yes, we have a deal with Microsoft, and yes we don't want people fighting over it, but with all the recent concessions from Microsoft, backing out of CPU reservations not once, but twice, you're talking about a 1 or 2 fps difference between the two consoles.

Ubisoft can't handle the truth.
 

Mrbob

Member
So it will be curious to see how well the console versions hold 30fps. I'm expecting 30fps with drops, perhaps some heavy.

The random jab at Mordor is pretty funny.

Mordor = Next Gen Gameplay

Unity = Next Gen Graphics

Seems like Monolith made the right trade off
 

KOHIPEET

Member
Here we go again.

I say I wait. If the game runs at the same fidelity, same fps and texture resolution, I'll know that this parity is just some kind of forced marketing deal-related shit.

If the game will run better on PS4 though....
 
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