Ubisoft released its latest Assassin’s Creed today, and it’s one of the first games to run significantly better on Xbox One than PlayStation 4.
Assassin’s Creed: Unity is a beautiful game, but those highly detailed visuals comes at a cost: the framerate isn’t great. On Xbox One, it was passable, but it less so on the PlayStation 4. In an analysis this game running on both systems, the tech experts at Digital Foundry found that Unity ran consistently better on Microsoft’s console than Sony’s, with it often dipping into the low 20 frames-per-second region.
Take a look at the game in action on both systems and watch the framerate struggle:
Both consoles struggle to run Unity despite it running at a resolution of 900p, which is 900 horizontal lines rendered for every frame.
Ubisoft riled up fans prior to the game’s release when producer Vincent Pontbriand explained that he wanted to go for parity to avoid the arguments about graphics. The publisher later cleared up that it didn’t hold back the PS4 edition to accomplish this, and it looks like that is potentially true.
In explaining why the game runs at the resolution and framerate that it does, Ubisoft pointed to the central processors on both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, which are nearly identical. The company said that the CPU couldn’t handle all of the artificial intelligence for all the nonplayer characters on the screen.
“We were quickly bottlenecked by that, and it was a bit frustrating,” said Pontbriand. “Because we thought that this was going to be a tenfold improvement over everything, A.I.-wise, and we realized it was going to be pretty hard. It’s not the number of polygons that affect the framerate. We could be running at 100 fps if it was just graphics, but because of A.I., we’re still limited to 30 frames per second.”
This is one of the first big games to debut with better performance on Xbox One than PlayStation 4. Since launch, games like Battlefield 4 and even last year’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag ran at either higher resolution, higher framerate, or both on Sony’s device. As for why, we’ve asked Ubisoft for an answer, and we’ll update this story with its response.