Large crowds are not the reason for Assassin's Creed Unity's framerate issues, says Ubisoft

Ubisoft's ongoing mission to stabilise the framerate of Assassin's Creed Unity has resulted in another blog post revealing that crowd sizes are actually not the reason the game doesn't run very well.

The developer posted another blog update responding to feedback it received on the game's performance on all platforms.

"We've received a lot of feedback on the performance of ACU over the past week and we’re taking it very seriously," reads the post. "We know this is a very important issue to you and we want to see it resolved as much as you do."

Some players suggested lowering the number of NPCs visible in any one scene, suspecting that it had something to do with the game's performance. Ubisoft said that it's been investigating the causes and has made some progress in identifying the issues.

"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," commented Ubisoft.

"It's taken us some time to make progress on this front, but we’ve got some promising findings to share.

"We can tell you that 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."

The developer added that several fixes are being explored right now, promising an update on when those fixes will be ready in the weeks ahead.

In addition, Ubisoft listed three main causes for framerate drops that the team is looking into improving.

• Streamlining some technical aspects of navigation: We've fixed a number of edge cases with our detection system to smooth certain behaviours during parkour. We've fixed a few objects which were improperly tagged to smooth navigation
• Improving task scheduling: We’ve tuned the way the computing tasks are prioritized and parallelized by the processor cores to improve framerate in certain edge cases
• Tweaking performance for Reach High Points: We’ve optimized the reach high points, during the camera swooping sequence to improve framerate a little bit