Last week, we wrote about the PC version of Assassin’s Creed Unity — coming November 11! — and its utterly ridiculous minimum hardware requirements. At a bare minimum, the game is meant to require an Nvidia GTX 680 — a $500 flagship graphics card from two years ago — and the recommended GPU is the GTX 780, a $500 card from last year. At the time, I wondered if the minimum specs were due to laziness on Ubisoft’s behalf, or whether Assassin’s Creed Unity, at higher resolutions that consoles can’t hit, is simply a very taxing game.
Now, a new in-engine gameplay demo*seems to put the argument to rest: Assassin’s Creed Unity is really, really pretty. Oh, and bad news if you have a Radeon: The game has certain graphics features that will only be available on Nvidia graphics cards.
I’m not a specialist in computer graphics, but I’d say that Assassin’s Creed Unity is one of the prettiest games I’ve ever seen. True, we don’t know what graphics card the game is running on in the video — it’s probably a new GTX 980, or maybe the GTX Titan — but clearly, we don’t need to worry about Unity on the PC being just a bad console port. (Of course, if it needs a $500+ graphics card that very few people own, then it doesn’t really matter how good the port is.)
Another thing you’ll notice is that the gameplay demo is powered by Nvidia, and that the game is clearly optimized for Nvidia GPUs. We don’t have the exact details yet, but it seems Ubisoft is leaning heavily on Nvidia-specific libraries (i.e. GameWorks) to implement certain rendering features. This means that, while AMD’s Radeon graphics cards technically support features like HBAO (horizon-based ambient occlusion), the use of Nvidia’s libraries mean that they’ll be much more efficient on Nvidia GPUs. In other cases, Assassin’s Creed Unity uses features that simply aren’t available on Radeon*GPUs, such as TXAA (temporal antialiasing) and PCSS (percentage-closer soft shadows). Whether Radeon GPUs will try to approximate these features (and take a big performance hit), or fall back to some older techniques, I’m not sure. In any case, at least on launch day, you’ll probably be best served by a recent Nvidia GPU.
This is some previously released artwork for Assassin’s Creed Unity. I’m not sure if it’s a render or a screenshot from gameplay footage.
This is in-game footage from the PC version of Assassin’s Creed Unity, showing a rather large scene (and fantastic depth of field).
Beyond all the various rendering tricks, the gameplay demo seems to show a pretty epic setting, with detailed textures, high polygon counts, and long draw distances. The big crowd scene*(screenshot above) would certainly suggest that Unity will indeed be very taxing on both your CPU and GPU, too.
Assassin’s Creed Unity is out on November 11 in the US, and November 14 in the UK. France, amusingly enough, gets it on November 13. As always, it will be priced ridiculously — and if you have about $150 burning a hole in your pocket,*there’s even a special Guillotine Edition that comes with, you guessed it, a model guillotine.
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