Assassin's Creed Unity will run at 900p/30fps on both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, Ubisoft has confirmed, with the publisher opting to aim for platform parity to avoid heated debates over any differences in performance.
"We decided to lock them at the same specs to avoid all the debates and stuff," senior producer Vincent Pontbriand told VideoGamer.com while explaining that it's the consoles' CPUs – not the GPU – that prevents Ubisoft Montreal from improving the game's performance.
"Technically we're CPU-bound," he said. "The GPUs are really powerful, obviously the graphics look pretty good, but it's the CPU [that] has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen, all these systems running in parallel.
"We were quickly bottlenecked by that and it was a bit frustrating, because we thought that this was going to be a tenfold improvement over everything AI-wise, and we realised it was going to be pretty hard. It's not the number of polygons that affect the framerate. We could be running at 100fps if it was just graphics, but because of AI, we're still limited to 30 frames per second."
Last year's Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag also shipped at 900p/30fps on both PS4 and Xbox One. A post-release patch, however, bumped the PS4 version to 1080p.
