Ubisoft says in-game crowd sizes not linked to Assassin’s Creed: Unity performance problems

A third patch that Ubisoft hopes will address some of the technical criticism aimed at Assassin’s Creed: Unity is on the way.

In an unusually frank post the publisher has said that the vast numbers of NPCs (non-playable characters) on-screen at any one time is not connected to the game’s performance issues.

Though crowd size was something we looked at extensively pre-launch, it is something we continue to keep a close eye on. We have just finished a new round of tests on crowd size but have found it is not linked to this problem and does not improve frame rate, so we will be leaving crowds as they are,” it said.

We have detected a distinct discrepancy between what we observed in the pre-launch versus post-launch environment. In spite of our testing, it looks like the instruction queue is becoming overloaded and impacting performance. We have several fixes we are exploring right now and will continue to update you with our progress of what is working and how quickly we can implement these fixes in the game in the weeks ahead.

We’re working very hard to see these changes rolled out in Patch 3, but as we’re still testing our fixes we need to be conservative with any estimates as far as ETA is concerned.”

The company has also said that it hopes to improve framerates by tuning the way the computing tasks are prioritized and parallelized by the processor cores” and by tweaking performance for reach high points during the camera swooping sequence”.