AC4 Black Flag thread

I though it was pertenant to post a thread about AC4 compatibility issues on notebooks as their video cards, despite the nividia TXAA anti-aliasing, are not officially supported.
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I for one, get a black screen after the disclaimer splash screen. i'm on a 675MX w/ 331.58, and hope to append this thread after updateing to 331.82.

 

Well that's worrying. Heard mixed things so far about performance - some saying it's on a par with AC3, some saying it's worse. As long as I can get 30FPS at 1080 with some decent settings, I really don't care.

Would be nice to hear back from people on this.

 

I ran ACIII very well on my clevo, i'm re-dlling/re-installing the entire bundle. Will post back w/ updates.

 

AC3 also ran fine for me. Got it to go at 30FPS at 1080 nearly maxed out so, as long as performance here isn't worse, I should be fine. Curious to see how you find it.

 

30 fps for an AC game is becoming the norm..

 

This is how well NVIDIA claims the game to run with 331.82 driver. The settings required to get 40fps with a recent quadcore CPU.

Never played an AC game before. Currently £30 on GMG. Will be interested to see how the game performs on laptop systems to see if worth a purchase...

 

the game runs at a solid 30fps on my laptop 7970m gpu i7 2.2. most things set to high AA down to low 1080p

 

35-50fps here, 7970M, 1080p, smaa, all high, with SSAO, godrays low, fog on.

 

20fps-25fps or less with everything low except textures on high and environment on normal, 768p res..
AC3 runs solid 30-35fps @ 900p and everything on normal + textures high

 

Time for a new laptop.

 

""Never played an AC game before. Currently £30 on GMG."
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I'd sugest to go grab it, as AC4's supposed to be one of the best in the franchise, and GMG has it w/ a 25% off voucher for $44.99USD. Highly recommended.

 

Time for Ubisoft to stop sucking.

Disagree. Wait for CD discount store to have the game for $10 or less. Nothing from Ubisoft is worth $45 with the crap PC optimizations they have. With the amount of sucking, IMO all they deserve is max $10 for their games.

 

I think I'm gonna wait for Steam Winter Sale and see if they bring out a performance-improving patch. Lots of talk of poor optimisation on the Steam forums. Already burned by Total War: Rome II and X: Rebirth this year - I don't want yet another poorly optimised game!

 

What do you expect? It's a Ubisoft game. Poor optimization and intrusive DRM are givens.

 

Ever since that broken mess that was Farcry 3 I steer of Ubisoft. I've started that game so many times after every update expecting improvements and watched that unskippable intro every time to the point where I now have total distain for that game and them. That for me was the straw that broke the camels back. Everything they bring to PC is unoptimised junk and it's not good enough being sold slops like that.
Watchdogs is said to be built for PC first which would be nice but it's probably nothing but hot air.

 

Lucky you, guys, the game doesn't run for me. I've been spending 2 days of troubleshooting, but the game just hangs on startup with: 'AC4BFSP.exe has stopped working', and that's it. I've tried everything the fans and Ubisoft suggested, to no avail.

There are many people with this problem in their forums, so this is a Ubisoft's issue. They are a bunch of incapable gits unlike I've ever seen, no game of theirs worked for me right from the start, I always had to look for a workaround or wait for a patch of theirs.

 

Well my GPU generally tends to fall between a 660TI and a 660 in terms of performance. Since I only want a locked 30, I think I can live with God Rays on low and volumetric fog off, especially as those are PC specific features. I only want parity with PS4 so I should be good to go for that.

 

Well balls - we have more or less the same PC. That's worrying... Mine's still downloading AC4 at home but because my router's so temperamental, I've no idea whether it'll be done or not by the time I get back.

You running Windows 7 or 8.1? I've got the latter so hoping that makes a difference.... Newest Nvidia driver?

Last Ubi game I bought was Rayman and they NEVER patched it to work in online mode. I had to manually turn off my wifi card to get past the menu screen every time, even with Uplay in offline mode, otherwise it didn't work.

 

Windows 8.0 64bit (passed on the 8.1 update), latest Nvidia driver (331.82), and I've tried everything you can think of: Offline mode, running directly from the exe instead of Uplay, verifying the game's cache several times, forcing eGPU, disabling every graphical option in the driver and the game's ini file, updating directx from the Support folder in the game, running the exe, alt-tabbing, then alt-tabbing back (someone actually said it works, go figure) and nothing at all.

I truly hope you'll have better luck than me, but if you do, I'll be envious as heck

 

Shadows on low compared to soft shadows high give me 4 fps, turning off HBAO+ 2 fps, decreasing resolution is also a too small fps improvement. I don't know how these devs plan the resource usage. I could run the first four AC's on an ATI 5650m at high/max and can barely run this on a GTX 770M and i7 :|.

 

Got bad news - it works for me. Ran home for lunch and the game was in the opening movies already. Didn't think it would auto-boot after install which was weird.

Anyway, played opening 30 minutes until you get to the first 'future' bit. Runs great.

Environment at High (max = very high), Shadows on Very High (max = soft shadows high), Textures High, FXAA, God Rays Low (Max = High), HBAO Low (Max = High), Volumetric Fog Off, and V-sync on at 1080.

Getting 40FPS on average. Have yet to get to a city so don't know if it will drop but will update once it has.

You should go to 8.1. anyway - it's way better and a rapid fast upgrade. I'm also on the last Nvidia driver, haven't updated yet so I'll do that once I get home to see if I get any performance boosts. For anyone with issues, keep environment at 'just' high as Very kills FPS, and turn off Soft Shadows. Difference is negligible for the latter and the PC-specific tech seems overly resource intensive with very little benefit.

 

I've seen the environment recommendation, but I even put it at normal and I get the exact same fps.

 

Darth Vader NO! - YouTube

 

Same here, but i have volumetric fog at on, it's around 40 fps and feel smooth, 30 fps felt a big laggy to me so i turned graphics down a bit to same as yours
Graphics look amazing, vegetation and water.. environment is amazing

I am on Windows 8, 680m.
It actually gets better once you reach the city, i am on 45 fps right now in the city

Sorry for double post, just wanted to state that i am using 331.58 drivers.

Turning down graphic settings does not give enough fps gains.

At everything maxed out and AA set to SMAA. I got 30 fps

 

I put shadows on high, FXAA and low HBAO and everything else on max im getting around 45-60fps. Mostly hangs in the 55fps range. Thats with a 780m. The max GPU usage i can get is 95%, with the new drivers. The game is just horribly ported. It drops down into the 25-30fps range randomly during cutscences, and goes down to 40-45fps when ever im near water. Changing settings from MAX to LOW only gave me a 15fps boost. Not to mention i cant even get the game to go over 60fps, with VSYNC off, my GPU usage just drops if i stare at a wall to try and get 60+

 

What's your CPU?

 

Great game though - im loving just sailing around exploring - not bothered much with the stabby missions yet.

 

LOL, this is Ubisoft's official support response:

We are sorry to inform you that you video card is not supported for the game you are trying to play. For more information on what specs you need to have to be able to play the game without any issue please click on this link below : https://support.ubi.com/en-gb/FAQ.a...id=22&productid=4186&faqid=kA030000000eaUUCAY Thanks

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

 

im using the 4700mq. its only using around 45%. I havent seen it use anymore than that. i was reading on another forum that going from a dual core to a quad core only gives your a 5 FPS boost. So the game isnt making use of a powerful CPU. I reinstalled the lastest driver last night and my GPU usage is around 95% now. Every few minutes it will go to 99% but it wont stay there. Even if i stare at the same scence with nothing happening it will just bounce between 95 and 99. i was getting 75-85% before i installed the newest driver so its an improvment atleast. You have to change the ini file to get it to 120hz. Since the ingame options only give me the option of 60hz, 120hz is nowhere to be found. Also my fps drop near the water magically dissapeared last night. So i got no clue what that was about.

Overall though it still runs good and is an improvment over how AC3 ran. Its actually a pretty fun game, might be my favorite one yet next to AC2. You can buy the nvidia promo code for it for $30 off ebay. Thats what i did.

 

That's dumb. If it runs on our PCs, it should on yours. How frustrating. Clearly an issue on their end. Still, I can't recommend an upgrade to Windows 8.1 enough, it might solve your issue too.

I'm just annoyed that I can't limit my FPS to 30 with NV Inspector AND have V-sync. Doing the former breaks the latter. And D3Doverrider doesn't work for me any more. Really a pain. Rather have a locked and consistent FPS than the massive swings I'd see otherwise. Plus it'd make my PC run cooler and quieter which is no bad thing.

 

Since it's working on every other 680m then yours then it's most likely not a hardware issue.
I'll suggest reinstalling Windows? Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 seems to be more compatible with latest games
and as Vitor711 suggested, Windows 8.1 may solve your issue, i am on Windows 8 64-bit and everything is working perfect here.

 

The issue was resolved by a recently released hotfix. It was Uplay all along.

Still on 8.0 and happy

 

^ Still downloading it....look at the pic to see why. *cries*

 

Wow, and they still wonder why people download from "other sources".

 

Exactly. Spending 3-4 days of troubleshooting, getting a half-arsed 'support' answer that my hardware is not supported, and then it's fixed by them. Ridiculous.

The game is awesome, I'm really enjoying it (except a few highly annoying sections here and there), but this is honestly the last time I'll purchase a Ubisoft game on release, and that is a promise.

I'm the stupid one here, though, exactly the same thing happened to me with Far Cry 3 and I didn't learn back then. Fooled twice, shame on me.

No more.

 

I am enjoying the game as well, albeit at a frame rate most would consider unplayable that I currently can't fix except if I play at 720p and with most stuff off/low (damn that bad resource usage). At least the game's really beautiful at max .

 

Funny, but I suffer no issue in that department, the game works perfectly with no slowdowns even in hectic scenes on the max graphical settings with all the bells and whistles turned on. I use 16x AF and 8xS FXAA with most of the extra fluff turned off in the driver's settings.

 

Your 680M is a bit stronger than my 770M, but the main culprit is the fact that the game only maxes out 1 core. Funny how they said multi-core usage would be improved.

 

Oh, wow! Well you will play it next year.

 

It'll be 75% off with all the DLC included in a Steam sale by the time you get it installed.

 

the new drivers are coming from nvidia just for ac4...hope it will improve at least 20% the performance..its a bit under what i expected

 

They already released a game ready driver for ac4, are they prepping for another optimization?

 

I'm a bit worried that they only mention it for the SLI systems and they don't even give their usual fancy improvement percentages.

 

I can run this game on my 460M @ 835/1600 on 1080p low settings @30fps, AC3 ran a lot smoother and higher settings, but what struck me is that the temperatures on my card never go higher than 68C. It is very odd since a lot of other games go 72-79C. Doesn't the game use full capacity of GPU? Although GPU usage is actually 99%.
Little offtopic, does my gpu compare to 480M stock clocks with this OC?

 

Not really, it can match 470m in some cases.

 

Yeah seems the new drivers were withdrawn..some reported overheating problems..maybe cause of that..btw rockstar made a new ip for bully 2 hope they make it for pc like gta V and i still have hope for red dead redemption

 

I'm running the game pretty smoothly w/ d3doverrider. after downloading the game 4 times on a 1mbs connection, i finally got a good dl. freacking uplay downloader cost me a few days of my Thai vacation, but everythings running smoothly, despite the game looking like a very very cheap ps3 port.

 

Finally downloaded it by going to starbucks


the game runs quite well on the Nvidia Geforce GTX 780M. Somewhat smooth and playable. Few bugs I encountered like the Jackdaw started flying (Greatest bug I ever encountered in an Assassin's Creed game). My ship went peter pan all over the damn island, even the crew members started hanging onto the ship. Grrr... I should have had fraps on >_<

 

Lol just watched a video with that bug 10 minutes ago!

 

The game is running extremely smoothly and glitch free for me with everything on full noise. I'm very pleasantly surprised by that after Splinter Cell Blacklist which was practically unplayable at launch on my previous Alienware rig with dual 6970's. A 1GB patch some 2 weeks after launch finally made it playable but still had some bad, bad bugs.

A few people mentioned Far Cry 3 in this thread, I had no issues with that game at all. Very impressed.

I'm hoping with the Watch Dogs delay, Ubisoft might be realising they end up burning themselves longer term by releasing half baked content to satisfy the immediate requirements of the bean counters. Much better to wait and deliver something polished than p off the end user.