By now most gamers have likely heard (or worse, experienced) about the frame rate and performance issues plaguing Assassin's Creed Unity. Ubisoft's latest carried a lot of hope and excitement heading into its release on Tuesday, but unfortunately much of that enthusiasm has dissipated.

And while we may never know what truly went wrong with Assassin's Creed Unity, some have taken it upon themselves to try to suss out the game's problem areas. Digital Foundry, for example, has given the game their usual once-over in the hopes of discovering how good/poor the game runs in given circumstances.

By and large, what Digital Foundry discovered was that Assassin's Creed Unity fails to hit the promised 30fps frame rate threshold on numerous occasions. Both interiors and exteriors chug at regular intervals – not to the point the game is unplayable, but enough that the performance dips are noticeable.

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Strangely, though, DF also found that the Xbox One version of Assassin's Creed Unity actually runs better than the PS4 version in specific circumstances, most notably with gameplay. In cut scenes, the PS4 appears as the clear victor, hitting the 30fps frame rate on a consistent basis, but almost everywhere else the XB1 outperforms Sony's console.

Ultimately, there's a lot of technical jargon to Digital Foundry's post and video, but the main takeaways seem to be that AC Unity runs worse than Black Flag did on current-gen hardware and the Xbox One version may be the way to go. They also determine that the masses of NPCs milling about play a significant part in the performance dips, which supports Ubisoft's claims the crowd mechanics are CPU intensive.

Beyond the questions of what went wrong with the game, many are wondering whether Unity's performance can improve through updates. So far, Ubisoft has remained relatively quiet on the issue, failing to provide any solutions or explanations as to why the game shipped in such a disappointing form. But worst of all, there are elements to Unity that are worth recommending (read our review). It's just a shame that getting to them is such a chore.

Which platform are you playing Assassin's Creed Unity on? Have you noticed any performance problems?

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Source: Digital Foundry