The holidays are fast approaching, and no doubt "Assassin's Creed Unity" is on the holiday gift list of many gamers. Fans enjoy the sprawling narratives and historical figures that have come to define the "Assassin's Creed" series, and they won't be disappointed with "Unity's" complex Abstergo storyline and excellent sandbox-style assassinations.

Visually, "Assassin's Creed Unity" is stunning. There's marked improvements in the geometry detail of characters and environments, and more complex texturing. New lighting and shading blend perfectly, giving the game a photo-realistic look.

Despite improvements, Ubisoft's French Revolution-themed expansion is riddled with bugs and issues, no matter the version. One of game's most significant upgrades is the dramatic increase in the amount of non-player characters (NPCs), which number in the low hundreds under certain conditions, reports Eurogamer. The problem is, it impedes the game's performance.

"Assassin's Creed Unity" PC Performance

PCWorld reports a big problem with running "Unity" on a PC is that the cinematics jerk around oddly. Ubisoft claims that 30 frames per second is "more cinematic," but PCWorld disagrees.

Other key performance problems:

  •  Players may see people popping into place in the game's massive crowds every few feet.
  •  Lighting is glitch.
  •  Overall texture quality is poor.
  •  Online-enabled features sometimes fail and result in a "Contact Ubisoft" error code.
  •  The game may hard-lock the computer.
  •  There are clipping issues.
  •  Occasionally, NPCs randomly walk in midair.
  •  Unstable frame rate during busy scenes occur.
  • Many issues are present during the cutscenes.

"Unity" reviewers say even when the game is played by Ubisoft's PC requirements, a GTX 680 minimum, some issues remain.

Assassin's Creed: Unity Xbox One Issues

"Unity's" overall image quality is matched between Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Another common trait between the two consoles is that some of the game content is locked out unless you participate in the web-based "Assassin's Creed."

Kotaku reports the game doesn't run well on Xbox One. It is the first third-party game this year to be developed for Xbox One and PS4, but according to Kotaku, Ubisoft bit off more than they can chew in the game's development.

There are three main performance issues:

1. A console frame-rate analysis from Eurogamer's Digital Foundry found the Xbox One version coming in under 30fps during prolonged game playing, creating an unstable playing environment.

2. The game is at times slow to respond to controller commands, like button presses.

3. Combat scenes see frame-rates slightly impacted.

"Assassin's Creed Unity" PlayStation 4 Performance

Eurogamer's Digital Foundry reports that the PS4 version operates worse than the Xbox One version, and here's why:

  •  Controls lack responsiveness.
  •  Motion judder is a problem; the picture stutters and shakes due to a frame-rate issue.
  •  PS4 isn't rendering at a higher resolution.

"We decided to lock them at the same specs to avoid all the debates and stuff," "Unity" producer Vincent Pontbriand told Videogamer, referring to the Xbox One and PS4 versions. "Technically we're CPU-bound. The GPUs are really powerful, obviously the graphics look pretty good, but it's the CPU [that] has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen, all these systems running in parallel."

He continued by saying that they were rapidly "bottlenecked."

"... it was a bit frustrating because we thought that this was going to be a ten-fold improvement over everything AI-wise, and we realized it was going to be pretty hard," Pontbriand explained. "It's not the number of polygons that affect the frame-rate. We could be running at 100fps if it was just graphics, but because of AI, we're still limited to 30 frames per second."

All "Assassin's Creed Unity" fans can do is hope for a post-release fix from Ubisoft that will improve the game's performance.

"Assassin's Creed Unity" is an action-adventure video game in a historical setting developed and published by Ubisoft. The game was released in November for Microsoft Windows, Xbox One and PS4. It is the seventh installment in the "Assassin's Creed" series.