LogInA former Ubisoft engineer explained why Unity's PC port was lacking.
Ubisoft
Assassin's Creed Unity didn't become the masterpiece Ubisoft probably hoped it would be, although some players appreciate its gameplay decisions. Many noted its performance issues, especially on PC, and the company's former principal engineer Sebastian Aaltonen has something to say about it.
According to him, Unity was "a tech masterpiece," but its PC port was bad because GPU-driven rendering on DirectX 11 "was a joke."
"IHVs [independent hardware vendors] were implementing their own MDI (multi-draw indirect) backdoors to DX11 in a rush to make the PC launch even possible. Thank god Windows 7 is dead now and we don't need to support DX11 anymore on PC."
"Unity was the first shipped game with a GPU-driven renderer," Aaltonen continued. Back in 2014, there were no popular alternatives to DX11 for PC, as DX12 launched in 2015, Vulkan appeared in 2016, and "practically no game developer targeting consoles used GL".
Aaltonen is glad Ubisoft "pushed consoles really hard" because the team used console-specific new APIs, such as MDI and async compute, which didn't exist on PC. "Sure some PC ports were rough, but DX12/Vulkan needed future looking content examples too."
Moreover, he believes the PC port needed to happen the way it was to accelerate Unreal Engine 5's Nanite and similar technologies, which were built on top of "many of these algorithms we invented back then."
"The way I see it: Assassin's Creed Unity PC port had to be bad quality in order for UE5 Nanite and similar modern tech to exist today. Somebody had to do the pushing. PC gfx API situation was bad back then. Early DX12 and Vulkan drivers in the following years weren't good either."
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