Assassin’s Creed Unity suffers from serious performance issues, incredibly low frame rates reported

Assassin’s Creed Unity launched yesterday and unfortunately Ubisoft has not managed to deliver the flawless game everybody was expecting. If you’re looking to buy Assassin’s Creed Unity, you should have a little bit more patience, simply because the graphics experience of Unity is surprisingly poor. Numerous player reports indicate incredibly low frame rates, glitches, lag and texture pop-in bugs, which quite honestly is shocking for a title of this magnitude. And the worst part is this is happening on all platforms. Looks like Ubisoft is in for some overtime work to come up with a series of fixes right away, as these performance issues are unacceptable and will not be tolerated by the huge number of players who put their money up in the hopes they will get a great game. So far, Paris seems to be burning, and it’s all but fun.

The video above, courtesy of ZeroX03 Gaming shows a PS4 gameplay footage in which severe stuttering is present in a random wall climbing scene inside a church, and it’s scary to imagine how the game will perform on the crowded streets of Paris with thousands of people wandering about, judging by this poor performance in a less demanding scene. Reddit user Merkwerk reports that Unity’s frame rate on PS4 is “not even close to a locked 30 fps, it feels like it’s running at 20 something most of the time.” He added, “I’ve had it drop way below that a couple of times already.” Other PS4 users followed with their thoughts on Unity’s ongoing performance issues: “Are you guys experiencing pop-ins and huge frame rate drops especially in huge crowds? I’m playing on the ps4. Got any advice to fix this?,” user Shenan1993 stated. Another PS4 user, iQuebic, reports “I think my PS4 is dying because I’m having a lot of problems with frame rate and textures lately, now I’m playing the part where you have to blend in the crowd to get past the guards and the clothes textures pop in big crowds is horrible. Is it really my PS4 or games just run poorly lately?”

While these issues are not limited to the PS4, Xbox One players furtherly reported seriously low frame rates on Microsoft’s console as well. According to ‘unvirable’ on Reddit, the Xbox One version is “really running sub 30fps, which makes it unplayable.” ‘Thewouldbeking’ advises: “I would like to warn anyone thinking about buying this game. I got it with my Xbox bundle. I just started it, and it runs sub 30 frames per second constantly. I would advise to wait until its fixed or not buy it at all. It is practically unplayable.”

PC players are already asking for a a massive patch to fix the multitude of Unity’s graphics issues. Notorious YouTube commentator TotalBiscuit said the PC version suffers from various issues such as “killer [pop-in],” outlining that the game is “glitchy as hell” and in general, a “MASS of bugs.” On top of this, TotalBiscuit and other PC players reported on Steam forums that the game is poorly optimized, and in order to hit a smooth frame rate without distracting lags, players need to have a pretty high-end rig.

This is very disappointing, considering that Ubisoft said they put a lot of time in the past months to optimize Unity in order to run in native 900p resolution and a locked frame rate of 30FPS. We’re awaiting for news from Ubisoft today to see what they have planned in terms of future patches to mend these problems.