After I had written up my previous entry, I decided to bump the graphics up. After all, since I’m already getting near-zero framerates, might as well have it look pretty right?
In my previous post, I had set EVERYTHING to the lowest possible.
So, now I decided to set the graphics quality to 3/4 (considered “high” I guess), while I left the detail level at 1/4 (“low”). I’m guessing “detail level” has to do with texture memory rather than polygon counts. To my surprise, Assassin’s Creed actually became FASTER.
My jaw dropped as the realisation dawned on me. I must be getting old, because I keep forgetting what I learnt a long time ago when Direct3D first came out. When you set graphics options too low, the graphics card (or GPU, the graphics processor) no longer handles the graphics, and your main CPU, the one on the motherboard, is saddled with all the workload. That explained why my CPU was beeping about heat overload! That was also why I was getting like 0.2 to 0.5 frames in the city!
Now with graphics bumped up slightly, the CPU no longer beeps about excessive heat. I still do get slowdowns, but my framerates are much better now – averaging about 10 frames per second compared to 3 to 5 previously on LOW settings! The only time now I ever get zero-framerates are during intense fights (lots of action) and when too many people are on screen (anything over 15 people in city streets). That means if I were to be walking around in the streets in a city, it’ll slow to a crawl. Hence, now I travel almost exclusively via rooftops, where framerates are faster.
I even tried turning on shadows. It looks great, and doesn’t seem to drop the framerates much. I guess I’ll leave shadows on now then.
Check the video out. You can see, when compared to my previous video, that framerates are indeed much better now. Yeah it’s still nowhere near to what you can see on Youtube where guys run this under newer graphics cards like the 8600GTs and higher. Naturally, framerates are high on those cards.
So, lesson learnt – don’t drop everything down to LOW.
