Assassin's Creed III performance issues? i7-3610QM + Nvidia 680M

I'm getting unplayable framerates in Assassin's Creed III on anything but low/medium settings.

I posted a little bit on this in the Sager users' forum on here, but thought I might reach out to a larger audience in this forum.

My specs:

i7-3610QM @ 2.4 ghz
NVidia 680M
16gb RAM
2x 128gb SSD.

So is the PC port of ACIII just crap? I've been reading about other people having performance problems, but it doesn't seem like an epidemic that would indicate a problem with ACIII itself. So is it just my hardware? Is ACIII really THAT intensive? The game doesn't even look *that* great to be honest...

Any info/advice/help is appreciated!

Update.

I was using the 306.97 drivers. Sirana recommended that I try out some beta drivers. The 310.61 beta drivers have given me a massive performance boost. So if anyone else around here is using an Nvidia card and having similar performance issues with AC3, try out the 310.61 beta drivers.

 

I've been unable to get this game running right on my 7970m. I also made a thread in the Sager section. Apparently people are having massive framerate drops and poor utilization once they hit Boston, regardless of having nvidia or amd cards. I'm hping for a patch, because it's completely unplayable at this point. Glad you got it running ok though.

 

That's exactly the same problem I had. The London area and the ship on the Atlantic were pretty decent, but Boston was like walking through a swamp. When I dropped the settings down it was very playable, but ugly.

Maybe the next ATI Catalyst drivers will be optimized better for ACIII. I think a big patch is coming out in the next week or so for ACIII too. Maybe that'll help you too.

 

I really hope so. I've been looking forward to AC3 for a long time. Hope things improve on your end too!

 

How much of a difference did you notice? Have you frame rate readings that have changed?

 

The difference can't be overstated; it's like night and day.

I'm playing the game with completely maxed settings now at 50-60 fps. Boston itself is always 60 fps. The only time it ever dips below 60 is in the forest areas. Even then it's barely noticeable. The game runs perfectly now.

Before I was struggling to get 40 fps with low/medium settings.

 

yeah 7970m here and in boston i get 30-40 fps maxed out at 1080p, hoping some new drivers come out soon or a patch, till then ill be playing it real slowly

 

yeah here too as well , ac3 is officially a slideshow on 7970m , what a useless piece of junk 7970m is

 

For those having problems with this game on their 7970m, have you tried using the 12.11 beta 8 drivers? I loaded it up on my laptop since I needed it for my desktop 7970 to fix weird graphical glitches so I don't know what the performance was before it, but the game plays more than fluidly anywhere I go. Note that I have an alienware so I disable the graphic switching on it when I play.

 

lol get a new card and quit whining.

 

What card if game is slideshow on best GPU they offer?

 

anything that would get him to stop whining about how "awful" the 7970m is. Any time someone says they have an issue with the 7970 (even if it's a problem with the 680m too) he goes on a hyperbolic rant about how the 7970m is a worthless scam. It's getting old lol.

 

ac3 is a crap port. i cant remember where i read it though. actually glad i stuck to a console for this game.your 680m/7970m should play easy

 

lol it should, but it doesn't. I'm wishing I had picked it up for my ps3 or 360 instead. Ubisoft dropped the ball on this port.

 

it is terrible. its a shame as its a good game. from a technical aspect the pc/laptop should kill it. its ok on console, but would be nice with all the pc goodness on it lol

 

Agreed. The game looks awesome (for a port) up until you hit Boston and everything goes FUBAR. I rented it on ps3 from redbox just to see how it looked on consoles and it's nowhere near as nice as it looks on pc. Textures and lighting are bad, and framerate can be janky too. I hope we don't have to wait months for it to become playable.

 

Wow..just going through Boston now and the graphics are truly amazing.
I have no issues with my setup getting 52 fps average and no fps drops so am surprised to hear others having issues.
I am on a 6990m/I7 2820QM and Catalyst 12.8.
One thing I have noticed is that after exiting the game my GPU is a nice and warm 83C but so far no crash no issues whatsoever. Loving this title and it's certainly quite beautiful/stunning in it's visuals.

 

Yeah I wasn't to happy I had to go with the 310 beat drivers just to get this to run. BO III required the same thing, but while using them I noticed I kept getting errors in BF 3 while playing after 20 minutes. So after playing both AC III and BO II I went back to the 306 drivers on my 680M and I'm back playing BF 3. IMHO neither one of those games were worth it.

 

Yeah man, the 7970m is still woefully underperforming with a number of games. It kind of speaks for itself if your older generation card can run it that well compared to the 7970m that it is mainly a problem with the card than the game. I wonder if Enduro will ever properly be fixed. One can only dream....

 

All your efforts are futile until Ubisoft fixes the game, problem I think is that Ubisoft doesn't care about PC Gamers for games like Assassin's Creed. There seem to be obvious problems with how DX11 was implemented, and the game doesn't utilize CPU or GPU properly. From what I've read of the game, it's a broken PC port, worse than the previous AC games.

The Anvil engine is awful, just terrible. Only reason Dunian isn't terrible is because CryTek is the studio that developed it. And the Splinter Cell engine seems to be alright because it's a modified UE2.5 engine. But when Ubisoft made their own engine, yeah... Maybe it's good for PS3 or whatever, but horrific for PC. Or I could be wrong and Ubisoft simply doesn't care.

Oh and the evaluation of the game on PC I read had nothing to do with mobile or Enduro. It's just a broken mess.

 

I agree. Sadly they do care... just not enough. Fixes are incoming though, loads and loads of complains to Ubisoft, they are working on it.

 

Well hopefully they're listening and will get this fixed quickly.

 

This is the main problem, AMD is getting slaughtered in AC3! Need fix soon as possible...

 

im a sudent and i had to throw all my savings on what should have been a cutting edge gaming laptop , not a laptop that i spent more time in the forum scouring for beta driver that do playable fps instead of actually playing games on . also on a plus note , if your okey with a 2000$ half-assed laptop with 7970m that is your problem , i expect to get my money worth not get scammed by a half-baked rushed product that is still broken 10 month after release

 

Amen. 10char

 

lol I bought my laptop after I knew the 12.11 beta was coming; I wouldn't have ordered a 7970m otherwise. I would have been pissed too if I bought the 7970m before the new drivers, but I did my research and didn't make the same mistake as you. With the new drivers, this card handles everything I throw at it on max settings and good frame rates aside from this POS port that is AC3. If you opened your eyes you'd realize that people with nvidia cards are having trouble running this game too. Hell, read the thread title if you want proof of that. There's also the fact that my laptop didn't cost 2000 dollars, nor is it "half-assed."

Also, I'm not sure how you had to scour the forum for a beta driver when pretty much every single forum section still has threads about the beta drivers on the first page.

Go ahead, keep whining and spouting your senseless hyperbole about the 7970m. You're in the minority lol. The majority of us are happy to have saved a few hundred bucks while still getting similar performance to the 680m.

Just think: if you'd spent half as much time getting a job and working as you have spent whining about the 7970m, you could afford a 680m by now. Or you could have returned the laptop in the first place if the problems were so severe, but you didn't. If you're unhappy, suck it up and do something about it. Crying about it on the forums doesn't achieve anything.

 

I guess the answer is to play Boston at 720p until it's patched. Although I will never understand how stuff like this ever makes it through QA.

 

It's pretty depressing. Ubi spent an extra month porting it to pc, yet the majority of people will have major frame rate issues. I'm worried about Far Cry 3, as it's one of my most anticipated titles of the year.

 

Can the 7970m be that bad? I seen it run great on different games! does it run badly on different games as well? Btw, my 6970m cf ruins the game, on a single 6970m it runs constant 40 fps and 35 in boston, just doable

Btw, i didnt seen any difference when playing with the resolution from 1080p to 720p... Also no real difference from high to medium settings?

 

i bought the 7970m way way before there was even any word on 12.11 or the 680m , i fell into the trap of the 7970m when amd was silencing every single retailer who said a single word on the enduro disaster , add to that my horrible greedy retailer who lied to me saying how good is the 7970m is , i fell unwittingly into the horrible clutch of the broken enduro . i dont know what great performance you are talking about but as far as im seeing all my current games "ac3 , nfs most wanted , tera , gw2 , swtor" are struggling to hit anywhere near 40fps at max settings . also when u have several beta drivers which u need to do a clean install with numerous restarts and bsods it takes forever to test multiple games with . the fact that im thousand of miles away from usa makes any thought of returning my laptop out of the question due to the fact it would be very expensive to pay for the shipping which would be equivalent to a new 680m , so to make it short amd screwed me and it my right to help others not to fall in the same ditch as mine.

 

I played all of AC3 and never had any issues. Your gonna want to turn environment detail down one notch from max to get a good 15 fps boost with no noticeable loss in quality. Other than that I had 40-60 fps with everything else maxed and TXAA on a 680m (850 core stock memory) using the newest beta drivers. Basically like the graph above shown for the 680m at 1080P except if you knock environment detail down you get a good 15 fps and my OC probably added another 5 fps or something. Even in Boston it felt buttery smooth.

Anyway it seemed like a fine PC port to me, graphics are often jaw dropping (especially the naval missions), and it is a really amazing game.

I think a lot of people are just expecting the impossible. These are next-gen engines we are starting to see and older hardware is gonna get slaughtered. This is gonna be the norm for the next 1-2 years until things settle down with next-gen engines.

 

Well you dont seem to have a problem with the game then. unfortunately everyone else kinda does. changing graphics settings did nothing for me fps-wise, also the game wouldnt start on any driver exept the latest beta driver, which in turn caused horrible performance in bf3 for me. Not only did AC3 drop frames, it seemed to go above the 60 frame limit by about 1-3 fps for a couple of seconds at a time, causing major stuttering. Its kinda hard to explain, but this is all but a good port in my eyes, seeing ubi had a month to fix it.

 

Interesting, have you checked the Ubi forums or maybe the steam forums to see if there is a fix for your symptoms? Your issues are certainly not the norm, most people get lower than expected FPS but that is because Very High AA (FXAA + MSAA) and Very High environment detail tend to murder performance. High for enviroment and TXAA or a lower AA setting will fix most of those issues on Nvidia systems.

You might try taking off your OC just to see if that could be the issue. Honestly, if you are using the newest drivers on the same card as me there is no reason you should have problems.

 

Well to be hones I finally turned of v-synch lol, so I dont get the massive lag issue, also overall fps seems to be better now but I have ti turn all the settings down ingame. is TXAA also adjustable ingame, I've only seen AA settings. I heard that TXAA is something new, so I have no clue if its in the AA settings ingame or has to be adjusted via ini file.

Anyway the game is definitly playable now, some sub 50 dips though... utilization is still at only about 60%, I know it doesnt matter, but Id like to get at least over 60 frames all the time with a 680m...

about the overclock: I only really use it for bf3, because everywhere else it doesn't help, it actually makes it worse with the newer games lol

 

TXAA is the fourth setting in-game for AA. It should go normal, high, very high, TXAA.

TXAA is a very high quality version of AA and it really looks good in AC3 (versus say Blops 2 which just looked blurry). It also performs better than than the high or very high settings in-game.

I would have to check but I might have disabled the in-game vsync also, which might be why I never had problems. For most games I just use the adaptive vsync in the Nvidia control panel. Nothing is worse than having the FPS drop to like 55 and the vsync forces it to 30. Adaptive eliminates that while also getting rid of most screen tearing.

 

Maybe you should stop running Driver Sweeper, it gives me BSODs. I do a standard 12.11 beta8 and 12.11P driver install and I have absolutely no BSODs any more.

I don't play any of those games, so maybe that's why our experiences differ. I have over 50 games on Steam alone, all of which play great, and many of which are extremely demanding. I won't name them all, but here are a few highlights that I'm reading from my library: Alan Wake, Batman Arkham City, Battlefield BC2, Battlefield 3 (on Origin of course,) Crysis 1, 2 and Warhead (both 1 and 2 are heavily modded,) Hitman Absolution, Max Payne 3, Metro 2033, Medal of Honor Warfighter, Saints Row, Sleeping Dogs, and the Witcher 2 to name a few. Every single one runs excellent on maximum settings. Many were unplayable before 12.11, but I knew that beforehand.

I understand feeling frustrated by 6 months of Enduro, but that's why it pays to do your research. This card has improved greatly since it was released, so calling it a POS and sh""ing on it in every one of your posts is hyperbolic exaggeration. The 7970m plays nearly all of today's most demanding games without a hitch.

 

This is an exaggeration. The card still severely underperforms in a number of games so saying it runs without a hitch is far from the truth. The fact is that 7-8 months after release we're still not seeing the card run properly is a joke. It was clearly a rushed product as a result of poor marketing and development.

 

I provided examples of games that play perfectly fine, and you counter it by saying it's an exaggeration without providing any examples of your own. Great argument bro

 

whoa! really?? are you playing at 1080p???

I have the same laptop (without the SSD, tho) and I'm getting 35-45 fps in boston, using 310.61 drivers D:

 

I'm using 310.64 with my 680m at 1000/2400 and I get 45+ in Boston at all times. 1080p via HDMI to my TV all settings maxed minus v-sink.

 

I lol'd +1

 

10 char.