Right, which is why I and others have only been saying that it has its moments of visual splendour, not that it looks great literally all of the time. Every single open-world game ever made looks rough when draw distance becomes the primary concern, but few -- if any -- look as nice as Unity does when the engine can focus on rendering finer details.
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[Digital Foundry] Performance Analysis: Assassin's Creed Syndicate
- Thread starter stryke
- Start date
Right, which is why I and others have only been saying that it has its moments of visual splendour, not that it looks great literally all of the time. Every single open-world game ever made looks rough when draw distance becomes the primary concern, but few -- if any -- look as nice as Unity does when the engine can focus on rendering finer details.
Can anyone with the PS4 version replicate this -
I've seen other PS4 videos where the shadows on the building top left are the same as XB1. I'm just wondering whether this was patched in/out or is there a difference in shadow draw distance or do the shadows draw in at a certain camera angle threshold.
I've seen other PS4 videos where the shadows on the building top left are the same as XB1. I'm just wondering whether this was patched in/out or is there a difference in shadow draw distance or do the shadows draw in at a certain camera angle threshold.
nelsonroyale
Member
Unity is da gawd of open world visuals. The very long thread stating so was no fluke.
The assets and lighting are out of this world for open world quality and even scaled down (from these real screens from here on GAF) would be glorious
It's gorgeous and yet to be defeated
Again, this look great, but don't really portray the whole picture visually. Detail drops off a cliff with big draw distances. It is very, very noticible. Personally, I think Batman AK looks more impressive overall, particularly in some of the batmobile scenes with insane particle effects.
icecold1983
Member
pc version was delayed until november a few months back
the lighting and materials just look bad in syndicate. theres also more aliasing even tho it appears they are using the exact same aa solution as unity. somehow, animation also looks worse.
Res has nothing to do with the CPU eh.
Yautja_Warrior
Member
With the downgrades they made to the crowds, it seems like Unity was just too ambitious with what the engine could handle, especially on consoles, plus the fact it was released before it was ready with all the bugs it had, it should have been delayed really.
But no matter, AC Syndicate still looks nice enough and runs much better than Unity, sticking close to 30fps most of the time, no sub 20fps here and it's a more focused game, no crappy online servers, co-op or companion app nonsense.
I wouldn't mind them trying the big crowds again one day but only if the engine can handle it with solid performance. It's not worth it, if it breaks the game again.
But no matter, AC Syndicate still looks nice enough and runs much better than Unity, sticking close to 30fps most of the time, no sub 20fps here and it's a more focused game, no crappy online servers, co-op or companion app nonsense.
I wouldn't mind them trying the big crowds again one day but only if the engine can handle it with solid performance. It's not worth it, if it breaks the game again.
alexandros
Banned
This time around day/night cycle are dynamic.
icecold1983
Member
but syndicate isnt even close to the best looking open world game on ps4. and its not doing anything particularly special from a non graphics perspective that would be eating up resources.
MGSV uses basic blocky structures and low poly actors.
Give it Bloodborne or ACU complexity and watch the engine crawl.
nelsonroyale
Member
Stunning in parts, not stunning in others. But yeah, considering the performance hits, I wouldn't say it was as impressive technical accomplishment as say Batman, which looks better to me and runs better.
Do people think they just made it 900p for a laugh?
I'm not getting peoples thought train on this one.
icecold1983
Member
no, id imagine most people, myself included, just think ubi engineers just did a poor job.
How can you even gauge this? You don't know how anything works. It's not like your going through their codebase and identifying a lot issues.
Poor job in the development environment usually translates to a tight budget, tight deadlines and an under resourced team. The engineers are just code monkeys which are derived from requirements from the business. The business which sets defect targets and performance baselines which mark it as ready to launch.
Hard to find a good peer comparison though.
E.g. Witcher 3 engine might bog down if Geralt could climb buildings freely.
icecold1983
Member
i know what the end results looks and plays like. that metric is really all that matters.
how about GTA V, other than not featuring PBR(which is a moot point since the materials in syndicate look worse than gta v anyway), GTA V is doing more in every area. more npcs, far larger map, draw distance a megaton higher, vehicles(you can enter and drive every single vehicle on the map) of all different speeds, watercraft and underwater traversal, flying vehicles etc. and this isnt even running on an engine properly designed for gen 8 hardware.
Dictator93
Member
As a reminder, we know this engine uses the GPU in a way other engines do not... so as to compensate for weaker CPUs (something they did because of the consumer reaction of how previous AC games scaled on the CPU and b/c of next gen consoles having jaguar).
Kind of like idtech 5, this engine has untraditional scaling and load profile.
Kind of like idtech 5, this engine has untraditional scaling and load profile.
So your only argument for lazy developers is that it's 900p and you don't like that.
If they spent another X amount of man hours working on platform optimisation, you never know, they may be able to get it up to 1080p on both consoles, it's just those man hours seriously impact a projects timescale, don't get factored into the project because it costs a lot of money and the game obviously meets the performance baselines which are set by the business analysts.
icecold1983
Member
it has nothing to do with resolution specifically. ryse was 900p and that game is a technical marvel as an xbone launch title(poor animation aside)
Honestly, after the controversy surrounding Unity last year, I expected 1080p on the PS4. It seems that even after downgrading the visuals, Ubisoft still can't get this to 1080p on PS4. On the bright side, frame rate is significantly improved and no longer on par with the XB1 version. I think Ubisoft should just take a break with this franchise next year to fix this engine to make it run better on consoles.
chromatic9
Member
I don't see why Ubisoft would be doing parity when you have Watch Dogs, Far Cry 4 and Black Flag and a PC version of Unity which wasn't held back to look like console. MS don't have the marketing deal this time. We have The Division and Rainbow Six coming so we'll see what happens.
With Unity unpatched, it runs uncapped on PS4 as NXgamer found out. Can't remember seeing much increase except for on the roof tops
With Syndicate I see drops in frames on Xbox One while PS4 is maintaining around a 30% higher frame rate. Not sure I think PS4 can carry 1080p well in this game.
With Unity unpatched, it runs uncapped on PS4 as NXgamer found out. Can't remember seeing much increase except for on the roof tops
With Syndicate I see drops in frames on Xbox One while PS4 is maintaining around a 30% higher frame rate. Not sure I think PS4 can carry 1080p well in this game.
Ah, understood. Well in that sense, it's a cost/profit decision. They've got a release date, a feature complete game. With the time they've got, it's a hard decision to priority call for what the teams work on.
You could argue that they should delay the game, but in a market where it's becoming absurdly expensive to develop AAA games with a business model which receives their majority of revenue on launch. It really impacts the financial sense of developing large games.
icecold1983
Member
the thing is, every game has time and budget restrictions. the syndicate dev team isnt in some precarious position unique to them IMO it comes down to all programmers not being of the same ability/skill. just like anything else, theres people better/worse at their job.
Programmers are just code monkeys, you should direct your displeasure with the games performance at it's architects. They design how the system works, the engineers just make what they design on paper.
If you had a sit down with them, they'd be able to state what they'd want to change and what they should of done differently. Although these refactors could take 3 man months to perform, in an environment which is under resourced and tight scheduled as it is. It doesn't make business sense. It's how it works unfortunately.
Dictator93
Member
If one reads the tech pdf linked in this thread, their goal was not only to make the game have better material rendering, but also to increase geometry density and object diversity. Something which the console CPUs could not bring them, hence how they went with their GPU driven pipeline as they term it.
Otherwise, the game would just be a PBR version of black flag with last gen levels of geometry and last gen diversity and density of objects.
I think you are perhaps too busy comparing apples and oranges when thinking about this game, it has completely different overarching goals in its rendering than most games and even most open world games. It has to decidedly render many more surfaces and objects, even in syndicate.
cyberheater
PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 Xbone PS4 PS4
Which is really daft considering they knew how relatively weak the CPUs are in next gen consoles.
Dictator93
Member
They did not focus on CPU if you actually read the tech presentation posted in this thread. In fact, they built their entire engine to try and mitigate the fact that the CPUs are weak.
I can imagine their initial design of the engine for next-gen was speculative in available resource in the new consoles.
I'm presuming they had a 'oh fuck' moment when they actually got told.
The business choices are Ubisoft's and not customers to worry about or accommodate. Nobody should think "poor Ubi they release new AC every year I'll cut them slack for insufficient optimisation". Plenty of AAA titles release with longer schedules and better optimisation. If people don't like what Ubi are doing they vote with their wallets and if sales suffer they suffer and Ubi has to decide what to do.
Myself, like many in sure, I'll wait for price to drop sharply exactly because of this. Unit sales might not be hurt but revenue and profits will and that's their problem for creating impression in market the franchise is oversaturated and quality will likely be sub standard.
I remember the thread about the devs who talked about the community. They were so right.
Yah agree Rockstar engineers are good, especially for the dual streaming solution on PS360.
Still, the remaster retained PS360 low poly models, and yet PS4 still had some FPS drops. I will be slightly stubborn here and maintain it's not very like for like
One big point, the average joe doesn't know or really care about these issues. So if they spent a lot longer, I'd be surprised if they noticed a single percentile increase based on the sales trends of previous games.
There's no trend line between the dev cycle of a franchise and the amount of money it makes.
No wonder they very rarely engage with the community. Too many people who haven't written a single line of code calling into questions devs work.
Angelus Errare
Banned
Pretty much.
Definitely. When you're dealing with a bunch of insufferable armchair developers (plenty in this thread) who will call them shit and lazy no matter what they do, what's the point?
Every single word you say will be broken down, over analysed and used as a stick to beat you with later.
And it's the same people who do this who then moan later on "publishers / developers should be more open!"
I'm sorry this isn't quite OT, but I get really annoyed with these people.
alexandros
Banned
It seems like a sensible way to tackle the CPU issue.
icecold1983
Member
if you go to a restaurant and get served shitty food, do you have to be a chef yourself to call the food shitty?
Terrible analogy. Food is something much more easily assessable on top of being very subjective, there are plates I just don't like no matter how well cooked they can be.
Technology and visuals are imo much less subjective.
Syndicate has an impressive amount of geometry on screen, very detailed characters, beautiful lighting and rich texturework.
Maybe they have underutilized the consoles, that's a possibility I can't discard but to me the 900p is hardly surprising considering how the game looks.
Dictator93
Member
CecilRousso
Member
That really is a dissapointing amount of compromises, for a game primarly made for these two consoles, two years into their lifecycles, in a franchises that sells so much just on it's name by now.
Maybe it's a bit too much to ask for perfect 1080p/60ps, but at least on of those three shouldn't be?
It's at least a sign of some lessons learned when they scale down NPC's and interiors to make the game run better, but based on that result, they should have scaled down the graphics even further.
That Stone Dude
Neo Member
This is where the hyperbole gets to me.
AC: Syndicate does not look like shit. I've seen plenty of games that look like shit, and Syndicate (for whatever faults it may have) isn't one of them.
icecold1983
Member
so, you have to be a developer to look at a game and compare the final result to others? what is this game doing that is so extraordinary that its beyond compare to all other open world games? they removed everything about unity that was impressive.
youre comparing my analogy too directly.
i guess this is where we disagree. i dont think it has any of those 3 things.
ninjablade
Banned
900P on both consoles is surprising, there are many techically impressive games out there on both consoles and they all have a higher resolution on ps4, most Performing better as well, witcher 3, batman, mgsv and star wars are the most impressive games on consoles, they all have a sigificant resolution advantage, and perform slightly better,
Dictator93
Member
No, I just think you need more context when comparing graphics and performance. Some of that context involves reading the secondary literature and being aware of what the game is actually doing behind the scenes in comparison to others. I think the AC series is pretty unique in the console space for rendering so many objects and geometry on screen.
Point out what is. on an objective scale that equivalates all technologies, more "technically impressive" in "many games out there" please. Just saying things like that with no point of reference is silly. Do you really think that the devs have lost more than 40% performance for no justifiable and explainable reason? Hence why it can't look better and run @ a higher res?
icecold1983
Member
2 of those games also run at 900p
And it was needed to achieve to more stable framerate. They did the right thing imo. Not being a developper or someone with an extensive programming background does not prevent comparisons, even valid ones, but if you want to question the devs for having made the choice they made then it certainly helps. According to you it does not take advantage of console hardware as it should, I wonder what makes you think this.
There is more than meets the eye sometimes. I think it looks very good in spite of not being as impressive as Unity.
The PC version should look even better.
ninjablade
Banned
They all run 1080p on ps4, only star wars is 900p on ps4 but its also 720 on xbox1, the rest are 900p on xbox1.
icecold1983
Member
i read that unity presentation a while back. im aware of their claims, it just doesnt translate at all to what you actually see in this title. the game isnt displaying some super high level of geometry. when your walking around the street, the city is designed so you dont ever really have a view distance of more than 100 meters, and when youre on the rooftops and able to see far, the lod levels are so close that its a bunch of blurry, low res boxes. theres plenty of games pushing more objects and geometry.
oops, for some reason i thought witcher 3 was 900p.
i dont think the hardware is sitting there idle, i just think the choices they made when building this game are poor.