Ubisoft provides statement on AC4 PC optimisation – proud of PC version

Ubisoft provides statement on AC4 PC optimisation – proud of PC version
James Orry Updated on by

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Update: Assassin’s Creed 4 associate producer Sylvain Trottier has provided VideoGamer with a statement clarifying his comments made to Edge.

“The statement that appeared online was very much taken out of context. I was discussing the process of developing for next gen platforms and, in particular, the R&D phase. Therefore, when I was referring to PCs, I was referring to them being used during the development of software for next gen consoles. I was commenting that when doing R&D, performance doesn’t matter. What you want is to be able to measure, to see the best results you could potentially get, how the game could look and feel if you would have this tech in the game. For example, if you are trying to see how the naval fight would look with tons of particle effects, you ask your FX Artist to simply add tons of particles. If it doesn’t run on your development PC, then you put a bigger GPU in the system and then you can see in game how it could look and feel. That doesn’t mean you ship this in the final game! Once you have a better idea of the visual results you could achieve with these new techs, then you need to start compromising and optimizing. Very often you end up deciding to drop certain parts of the feature (even if they were really nice!), in order to be able to run the new feature in real time, on all the targeted platforms. There was no tech developed during the R&D phase that wasn’t optimized prior to shipping on each platform – PC included.

“We are very proud of the PC version of Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag. The game runs well on low-end PC’s and lots of additional features were added for higher-end machines, allowing each and every customer to fully enjoy the experience on their PCs. Our partnership with Nvidia that saw our respective engineering teams work together to develop a highly optimised PC version also demonstrates our commitment to the platform. On top of this, additional features were implemented such as: keyboard and mouse optimized control, three screen support, higher resolution support including 4K support, unique effects and technologies, including NVIDIA HBAO+ (occlusion), NVIDIA PCSS, NVIDIA TXAA and NVIDIA GPU-accelerated PhysX in an upcoming patch.”

Original Report: Optimising games to run more efficiently on PC hardware isn’t important, Assassin’s Creed 4 associate producer Sylvain Trottier has claimed.

Speaking to Edge about the ease in which the studio achieved results when working on the Xbox One and PS4, Trottier said: “The new platforms are a lot closer to PC, so my engineers could do the R&D on PC and we knew it would work fairly easily on next-gen platforms. It needed to be adapted, but everything does.

“It’s always a question of compromise about the effect, how it looks, and the performance it takes from the system. On PC, usually you don’t really care about the performance, because the idea is that if it’s not [running] fast enough, you buy a bigger GPU. Once you get on console, you can’t have this approach.”

Assassin’s Creed 4 is released for PC on Friday, November 22.

Assassin’s Creed 4 has already come under criticism for poor performance on high end PCs, so could this attitude towards PC development be the reason?

Source: Edge #261