[pjcnet]

I'm afraid upgrading from 2GB to 4GB won't improve performance much as there's a serious problem with the frame rates in this particular game on often powerful PCs, but there's no harm in upgrading as it will speed up Windows and loading times as it will cache more. Under normal circumstances an MSI Geforce n250 GTS graphics card should be good enough to play a game of this quality on at least medium settings, in fact some well optimised games could run even on high settings quite smoothly, but this game has problems and it's not therefore normal circumstances. Ensure however you're always using the latest drivers as you can be surprised how much it can improve performance on some games, unfortunately this isn't sufficient to make this game run well, but it could still improve it somewhat. Getting a better graphics card will help and will make other games run better too, but even some upper end cards still have slow frame rates on this particular game. Graphics cards have recently come down in price too with a good middle of the range DX11 cards costing from £80-£150 (UK price) that will play most new games on high settings and higher end cards are now starting from just over £200, but SHOP AROUND as prices vary greatly, also remember that higher end cards need better PSUs and the best often require a 6 Pin PCI-E and 8 Pin PCI-E power connector, so check all this too. I for instance picked up my Nvidia GTX480 for just over £200 as the release of the improved GTX580 and 500 series cards caused a price crash across the board, but some suppliers are still charging £350+ even now for it (I say again SHOP AROUND), my graphics card is still a very respectable upper end DX11 card that was the best single GPU only 6 months ago and I get very good frame rates on high settings with all the new games I play except this one (The Nvidia GTX480 needs a quality 600W PSU minimum with a 6 Pin PCI-E and 8 Pin PCI-E power connector).

I have an AMD 1055T 6 core processor running overclocked at 3.43 GHZ, a very respectable Nvidia GTX480 1.5GB graphics card (slightly overclocked), 8GB of DDR3 1600MHZ memory and Windows 7 x64. I’m using the very latest graphics drivers and my PC is always very well maintained. My PC specification is well above the official recommended system requirements for running this game, yet the frame rate on very high settings are absolutely dire between 5 to 40 FPS, but averaging only around 12 FPS which is utterly terrible and very choppy to virtually unplayable at times, especially when there’s a lot of scenery. These frame rates are with the epileptic filter off and apparently if you turn this on it can reduce your frame rates considerably even more, so if you have this disability you're in real trouble unless you have a mega gaming PC. The graphics are reasonably good, but I’ve certainly seen better graphics on other games where I get super fast frame rates and it certainly shouldn’t be slowing down on my PC at a middle of the road 1600×900 resolution. I’ve checked and only 2 cores out of 6 are ever used on my processor when playing this game and 1 of the 2 cores used hovers at around 40-50% used, but my GPU usage goes from around 40% to 90% used which is crazy for such dire frame rates and quite a powerful GPU.

I can play numerous high specification games with much better graphics at much MUCH higher frame rates and this game is the odd one out. It certainly needs patching / reprogramming very urgently and in my opinion it isn’t fit for release as it’s below merchantable quality, I therefore urge people who are unhappy to take the product back as you are legally entitled to a full refund under The Sales of Goods Act in the UK and similar consumer laws exist in most countries throughout the world. I have a respectable gaming PC, but this game makes my machine look more like an old Pentium 4 PC with an on board graphics card and there’s really no excuse for this. I’ve even read that some people with even better gaming systems than mine, for instance with a powerful I7 processor and a top of the range Nvidia GTX 580 graphics card are are still experiencing poor frame rates. I could turn the graphics down lower, but why should I when I have way above the recommended system requirements to play on very high settings and even on lower settings my frame rates are still poor and very intermittent? This game is extremely badly programmed to say the very least and my PC most certainly should easily cope with these only reasonably good graphics at their best with good frame rates. Perhaps ATI cards perform better, I don’t know, but most Nvidia cards are reported as having performance problems across the Internet. What happened to quality control and testing? I suspect this game was rushed for release on a set deadline that they didn't want to break, but most people would rather wait longer for a game that works properly. I'm disappointed with UBISOFT.