Man, what a train wreck this is. As we informed you yesterday, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag has major issues on the PC. While the game runs better than its PS4 and Xbox One cousins, it does not take advantage of more than two CPU cores. On the other hand, its GPU requirements are off the charts and if that wasn’t enough, Nvidia and Ubisoft are preparing a PhysX patch for it.
What surprised us, though, was the following statement from the game’s producer, Sylvain Trottier. Trottier claimed that on PC people don’t usually really care about the performance as they can purchase new GPUs to overcome various performance issues.
As Trottier told Edge (spotted by Videogamer):
“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.”
Seems to me though that a lot of people misunderstood what Trottier’s point actually was. So I’m going to play the devil’s advocate and say that Trottier used poor words to describe what he obviously meant. Trottier believes that developers have to further optimize their games and compromise some effects to make their titles run on consoles, something that does not happen on the PC front.
In short, I’m pretty sure that Trottier was speaking about the visual fidelity of a title and the fact that they don’t have to dumb down anything on the PC. After all, on the PC you can use demanding graphical features that may put the available high-end cards to their knees, meaning that newer cards will be able to offer better performance. Not that it is okay to release unoptimized games like AC4.
Of course a title has to display visuals on par with its requirements. AC4 requires really high-end GPUs to shine and there is nothing groundbreaking about its image fidelity. Most characters look old-gen, their animations are good but not revolutionary, and the game’s LOD is awful. Now do not misunderstand this; AC4 looks great. Still, its visuals do not justify the game’s requirements.
Kudos to our reader ‘Lucas Gusmao’ for informing us.
Stay tuned for our SweetFX vs Vanilla article that will go live later today or tomorrow!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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