Link '“There is definitely a lot of push coming from publishers to not make the experience so different on consoles as to alienate people into thinking that next generation is not as powerful as PC,” said the developer. “This is probably what happened at Ubisoft Montreal. I think that while making stability changes is definitely important, it does not completely obliterate a lot of enhanced rendering applications.”' ...'“They will not admit that they practice this or actively downgrade a game,” they said. “It is much easier to say they removed things for stability which is often a lie as you can tell by the post-issues which are expected in any production we do.” They additionally expressed their hopes that game company’s making “false promises” about their games will stop creating hype “that they ultimately cannot deliver on.”' So far just more rumors from people claiming to be devs, but seems perfectly in line with the Watch_Dogs situation. Funny how we finally get a new set of consoles to raise the bar for third-party developers, yet... we get this. On the bright side, I can't wait to torrent Far Cry 4.
That's not a rumor. The devs have been doing it since release of the previous generation of consoles, especially frequently close to the end of the cycle. Remember how a couple years back the devs started "coming out of the closet" one after another saying Oh yeah, the consoles are shit and can't keep up with PC. Didn't last long, huh? Vote with your fucking wallet, don't buy anything from Ubisoft and everyone else pulling this crap. Pirate if you want to, but don't give them a cent. If we do, they'll just keep lying.
I understand how having to develop the same game for a console with half a gig of RAM can really hold things back, and how some developers might not bother fully implementing all of the crazy DX11 features when most of their sold copies won't ever use them, but I hadn't really heard anything about developers intentionally releasing poorly optimized PC ports so that consoles don't look as bad, at least last gen.
When a PC version of a multiplatform game has slightly sharper textures and some slight AA in comparison with a console version, that's exactly what happened.
I agree with most of what's being said here (and I can't say with 100% certainty that I know this is what they're doing, but I do believe this is what they are doing based on what I've seen), but I'm wondering - what do you guys think of the PC version of Far Cry 3? For one moment let's ignore the horrifying abomination that is Uplay and just imagine the DRM isn't there, but focus completely on FC3 in terms of its flexibility and the geographical advantages it has or has not over the console versions. I'll tell you already that my impressions are mixed, though I'm somewhat pleasantly surprised overall considering this is an Ubisoft game, Uplay aside.
I heard it had a good amount of issues at launch, but I think the end product was very good. It was actually because of my positive experience with that game, AC4 (which was, for the most part, a pretty damn good PC port IMHO), and Child of Light that caused me to preorder Watch_Dogs.
I'm not surprised. When looking at the sheer customization they give you in the settings, it's like a PC exclusive (even more so with all the HUD options they've patched in since release). The visuals look considerably better than they do on the consoles - it's also a smoother experience. Uplay and all that other crap aside, I am disappointed by the performance drops. On my mid-range gaming PC (playing on 1440x900), I get an average of 51 fps when playing on tweaked ultra (everything maxed, except for: msaa = off, post fx = low). However, every now and then, when distant areas are loading I get a noticeable drop in fps and my performance also suffers when I'm near a marked objective. As soon as the objective is done, it's back to normal (thankfully this happens only sometimes). A strangely optimized game, that's for sure.
Definitely. Framerate drops seem to occur more in cities. I've had some parts where I can look down on huge vistas with no real issues, and parts where I see nothing but a few rooftops and get pretty bad spikes, probably something CPU related. Doesn't explain the lower framerates in the first person sections, though. Biggest thing that I surprisingly got a decent performance boost from was disabling percentage-based shadows. Ran with everything else on Ultra/High (low tesselated Godrays I think, too), SMAA and I got similar framerates at 1080p on a 660 TI. Almost never went below 30 at least.
