Ubisoft's hate towards consumers and fans.
As we approach the biggest shopping season, companies within the gaming sphere are getting ready to start shipping out some of their biggest titles. Part of that push to entice consumers is the release of hardware requirements in order to run their games. Ubisoft in the past few weeks has released their spec tables for two of the biggest games to hit us before the holiday season, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and Watch Dogs: Legion. One look by any experienced computer enthusiast will cause that individual to scratch their head and go “What? Why?”. Some of the requirements don’t really make sense is you want your product to be widely disseminated across every platform so that millions of fans can enjoy the products of your labor. I firmly believe this is Ubisoft giving up and we are going to have a repeat of the Assassin’s Creed: Unity catastrophe. I will run down some requirements that stand out to me; SSD, Video Cards, and Dual-Channel Ram.
The SSD issue.
Let us start off with this Solid State Drive (SSD) requirement. I know that in today’s age, having a SSD is kind of a no brainer. The price point that SSDs once had was sky high but have bottomed out to being extremely affordable that they are even found in budget laptops and desktops. I still use magnetic disks for cold storage of important files (tax returns, vet records, etc), outside of that, there is no real reason to not have an SSD. There is 2 big issues here. Those are “What type of SSD?” and “What type of Interface?“. To a average consumer. There is no difference between a 2.5” SATA II SSD and a M.2 PCI-e 3.0 x4 SSD if they are both 500GB.
The Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 use SATA II with a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) drive speed of 5400 revolutions per minute (rpm). I know that the newer models eventually updated to a SATA III interface however they kept the 5400 rpm speed. This effectively makes it so the game has to perform to a specific level while files are being read under 100 Megabytes per second (MB/s) never mind writing because of autosave, reading and writing due to Ubisoft's Connect platform that will ALWAYS run in the background. That will wreck havoc on such systems. Even if you get a SSD on these systems with SATA III, that is a max of 500-560 MB/s.
GPU recommendations don’t make sense.
When you look at recommendations to see get an idea of how your Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) card will effectively render your brand-new-blockbuster-AAA title, you would expect that the recommendations would make sense. Sadly, Ubisoft, seems to believe you don’t really know the difference or, even worst, they don’t know the difference.
“Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla” lists the AMD RX 5700XT or a Nvidia RTX 2080 Super required for 1440p (2k). This makes little sense to me. If we take a look at the Nvidia 2060 Super is, in a Tom’s Hardware benchmark, between 7~10% slower than AMD’s current flagship GPU. This means a 2060 Super should be able to run at 2k just as easily. What it looks like is they just went “What is the latest and greatest GPU’s? Oh and Higher numbers first!” without actually doing any research.
“Watch Dogs: Legion” makes about as much sense as a four year old talking about why we need to buy the new iMac Pro when laying out recommendations. From the mashed up cards, what I can tell is there is only 1 piece of logic shared here. VRAM capacity. Seriously. Never mind that a GTX 1650 is shown to be weaker than the R9 290X in user submitted benchmarks. Never mind that the AMD equivalent to the GTX 970 is the R9 290X (or the 390X because it’s a refresh). What it seems to be here is that the game requires a large amount of buffering frames to be stored in order to meet specific framerates. This seems to follow as we move up the chain into higher specs. The mismatched gens only makes sense if we look at it from a required space for buffering frames.
Dual-Channel as a Pre-Req is…
Dual-Channel setups is the way to go. Dead honest. The ability to access two separate sticks of ram at the same time allows for faster computation and helps eliminate the bottleneck of the system being the memory controller. For a more in-depth discussion of how it works, click here for a wiki article. It is a quick and easy upgrade for a lot of systems...
As great as multi-channel (there is tri and quad-channel setups) is. It is not the standard for a specific reason. They are in the end a nice to have. Because it is a nice to have. Things like consoles, some pre-built computers, some laptops, and *gasp* gaming systems are not configured to (and sometimes can not be configured) to utilize multi-channel setups.
Pre-Builts Gaming Computers are extremely important. The allow people access into the world of Tech and Gaming. Regardless of where you get them, the help usher in newer users and allow the expansion of these 2worl that we love so much. However, most entry level pre-builts come with a single stick of ram. Thus these systems will have to run in single channel. If you are buying a pre-built system, you most likely don’t know anything about the full aspects of this amazing world, let alone what the blue hell “Dual-Channel” means.
So what does this mean?
Well dear reader. Let us do a quick recap. Ubisoft has placed the requirements of: 1. Any ol’ SSD. 2. A 2080 Super for 2k for one game and a 1060…er. a 1660, no wait. A RX 480… You know what, just pick one out of the listed 3 for the other game. 3. Requires Multi-Channel. Oh and for an extra bonus, you have to sign up for the completely cloud based yet-required Connect platform in order to play these games.
The biggest insult is that this isn’t some early access alpha specs. This is the refined product specs. That these games are such a mess that it requires vast amount of system resources to run and Ubisoft just looks at us and goes “Hey, it Watch Dogs and Assassin’s Creed. Give us money!”... I for one will say no to this kind of treatment.
Where do we go from here?
The answer may not thrill you, but the answer is pretty simple. Spread the word and for the love of all that is unholy. Don’t buy either of these games. Companies like Ubisoft will only listen when games tank.
Excerpts from my original article on my blog cthulhusbff.com. Click to read the full article regarding my opinion on Ubisoft's current practice.
