I bought some Ubisoft games on PC because they were supercheap on Steam, but good grief are they badly optimized! They're trying to become the next Rockstar in PC optimization. In Splinter Cell: Conviction, what is most amazingly bad is that dropping from 1080p to 720p really didn't help much. It's just always a framey mess unless you have a 6990 or something incredibly powerful. It looks pretty good indoors, although still rather demanding, but get outdoors or several enemies and it's a slideshow. Assassin's Creed II is also rather demanding and doesn't really look all that much better than the console versions. Ubi just doesn't do much to get their PC games running properly. These aren't brand new games, so my assumption is that I shouldn't expect much improvement via a patch or update. I suppose eventually I'll have a PC that will be able to run these properly, but by then they will really look like crap compared to new games.
Thanks for that AKS. Saved me the trouble of buying AC1 off steam only to find that my would 360 run it better.
I decided to wait for a bundle. Right now it's little less than what you paid if they had an AC bundle. I'll bet they'll bundle it for a bit of extra savings by years end.
Hmm I played conviction pretty hardcore and didn't have any issues running it maxed out on my radeon 4870 1gb. This is finishing through campaign, coop, and most of the other mp modes.
Conviction ran pretty well here too (on a aging GTX275), maybe my cpu made up for it, an i7 920. But yes, Ubisoft games suck anyway, Conviction running good or not, game sucks. They are becoming close to Rockstar, but nowhere near on how much GTA IV sucks, i remember buying the game and trying to install it for atleast a whole xmax day. Litterly, ive never seen a complicated and messy game install like GTA IV. The whole gwfl thingy is a big chunck mess, and the game itself runs crappy on ANY system out backthen. Even nowadays, two weeks ago i installed GTA IV, wanted to copy my old savegames that were made on another PC, and another Live account, i had to edit the registry, apply a crack, install a patch (which mysteriously removed GWFL and installed it again). Took hrs of fiddling. Then to find out that the MP didnt work cause my Live account wasnt 'linked' to Rockstar Social Club. After doing the linking process, i found out that thanks to the 'savegame fix', the MP was disabled to prevent cheating. I also dont understand why this game isnt running smooth, a i7 920/gtx275/6gb ram was pretty high-end in 2008 i suppose, it doesnt look that much better then the console versions, and still runs like dogshit. How this game could get this much rewarding and millions of copy's sold, is beyond me. Wonder how many people actually got to play the game. I remember on release, ATI owners were nailed by getting glitchy textures and had to wait for a patch. GTA series=just like CoD series since IV and on, probally.
Beyond Good and Evil was quite some quality game. And still is. Lol, ATI players mostly get fooked with glitchy textures or slower framerates. Team Fortress 2 and L4D2 etc. Still couldn't find a fix for that.
I'm not sure what's going on, then. Conviction is OK indoors most of the time, but it really bogs down in the outdoor situations. The graphics actually do look pretty good, but the framerate is an inconsistent mess. I've turned AA and AF completley off, and it's still not smooth. I don't get why this game is so ridiculously demanding. I can get Metro 2033 and Crysis running and playable in the High range with this same PC. It's also ridiculous that an open world game like Just Cause 2 looks and runs as well as it does and then Conviction only runs halfway decently indoors with most things durned down. What is supposed to be the biggest strength of the engine used for Conviction? It was supposedly too much for the PS3. It evidently didn't run that well on the 360, as they had to cut the resolution. Now I discover the PC version also runs like crap. Ubisoft talked about how it was so high tech and cutting edge; evidently no platform can run something this advanced. Or maybe their engine and optimization just sucks instead.
Blame PC reviewers then. Either they had no issues whatsoever with the game or they were bought out by hype.