14 DAY TRIAL // Assassin's Creed Unity will mark the advent of a performance boost all across the board for Ubisoft's games, due to the brand new renderer architecture implemented for the action adventure video game.
An interview with Ubisoft's Pipeline Technical Director, James Therien, reveals some interesting information about the upcoming entry in the Assassin's Creed series, pertaining to the technical side of things.
The engineer is confident that the new renderer architecture pioneered for Assassin's Creed Unity, designed to scale well on multi-CPU systems, will offer a performance boost similar to AMD's Mantle or Microsoft's DirectX 12 application programming interfaces, on all the platforms that the game will be running on.
"Globally, our engine scales very well to multiple cores. Unfortunately, we hit different bottlenecks on different platforms. Traditionally, on higher-end PCs, we would be graphic driver bound, negating the benefits of having more cores."
"On Assassin's Creed Unity we completely changed the renderer architecture to drastically reduce the number of draw-calls we make to the driver. You should see much more scalability on Assassin's Creed Unity," Therien told DSoG.
He said that the PC version of the game would be much better optimized than any of Ubisoft's previous games, which are notorious for not running very well on a wide range of PCs.
"As I said, we totally rewrote the low-level renderer for Assassin's Creed Unity. One of the reasons is to deal with the same types of issues that are solved with Mantle and DX12. We're finding ways to push the hardware to its limits," he explained.
This means that Ubisoft has been hard at work trying to improve its renderer, which was accused by many as the main source of Watch Dogs' stutter and general performance issues on PC.
The company pledged its commitment to improve the way it handled PC releases of its games, after taking several PR hits in the department, starting with its DRM policy, and the many issues people ran into while using uPlay, and the reported downgraded visuals in the PC version of Watch Dogs, meant to tone the visuals down to the level of the console variants.
Assassin's Creed Unity is slated for release on October 28, coming to the PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 platforms.
Ubisoft also has a nice offering in store for owners of the last generation of consoles, in the form of Assassin's Creed Rogue, headed to the PS3 and Xbox 360 on November 11.