What I find particularly maddening about Assassin’s Creed: Unity’s weird technical issues is that lowering settings really doesn’t produce much of a frame-rate boost at all. There’s no point having the game fluctuating from 25 to 45 all the time, and there’s no chance of me reaching 60. I’ve actually started using RadeonPro (you can see my options in the shot above, click to enlarge) to just lock the frame-rate to 30, force the processors to high priority, utilise triple-buffering and so on. This doesn’t necessarily fix anything, but it does at least force the game into trying to keep a smooth 30fps. Realistically, the upper limits for me are in the 40s. But only when climbing something and looking at the sky. The worst dips are still 22fps or so (except for the mega-stutters which tank it to the teens for a second or two, but these occur a lot less after the Omega update,) and the max FPS is still 60. In comparison, Patch 4 doesn’t seem to … have done much at all. It still stuttered and hitched, and there were still frame-rate dips to the low 20s, but those latter events appeared (and maybe this was just placebo) to be less frequent. Indoor locations stopped murdering my frame-rates quite so violently, too.
They gave me moderate boosts at 1080p (3-4fps, but enough to nudge it close to that solid 30) in the denser parts of Paris and seemed to somewhat mitigate the weird gameplay pauses Unity was previously suffering from.
In fact, what seemed to help me more than Patch 4 (which we’ll get on to shortly) were AMD’s new Omega driver set.
Indoor locations don’t destroy my frame-rate, so that’s an improvement.