massive fps drops?

Anyone else get massive fps drops, so when i start the game im on around 30 and it stays like that for maybe 10 mins then progressively drops to around 6 fps which is almost unplayable

Does it stay that low once it gets there?

Sounds like you found a weird memory leak or something is overheating.

That's odd, I'm not getting that. Its does sound like a memory leak situation as Teoball said.

PC version?

You didn't say which version you're playing.

pc version

and when it gets there it pretty much stays there

Definitely a memory leak then, as mentioned by others.

Specs? also are those fps numbers measured or eyeballed?

You could try turning down the graphics and see if you still get performance deterioration after 10 minutes.

Haven't heard much about reoccurring memory leaks. Maybe the one here and there occasionally, but not reoccurring. Share your PC specs and game graphic settings so we can better help. You may be running out of RAM or video memory.

I was waiting for the PC version of this but my moms got me it on 360 so Ive been playing all day on that version. I must say they must have sorted their issues with AC3 as there has not been any slowness for me yet, I think the key thing they did was the draw distance is miniscule, with people obviously forming from thin air in front of me pretty damn regularly as well as textures forming in as im running towards them but I would easily take this over a shitty framerate.

GeForce GT 630M

i7-33610QM 2.30 GHz

8 GB RAM

already running on extreme lowest settings

1366 x 768 res

tried running it at the smallest res possible made no difference

I used razer game booster to measure the fps

Does the game booster fiddle with anything other than showing you fps? If it does you may want to try with that off. Things like that can have mixed benefits.

Since you are on a laptop, power and heat is a potential issue. Try running the laptop on a flat surface.

Ubisoft also got some sass about their new split gen games running a bit bloated on PC so it may just be an optimization problem.

That isn't a gaming GPU so it *would* have trouble without any odd issues, but getting worse over time sound like a memory issue or heat/power issue.

Try using direct x 9 version. Also turn off tesselation

it does heat up a bit but nothing dangerous, hoping its just optimization and they will fix it, seems to be a lot of complaints about fps and lag.

Might have to wait on it until they fix it, its a great game but pretty unbearable in this condition.

There could be something related to the optimus junk that gets built into those machines which switches between the IGP and the discrete GPU.

However that 630M is essentially in the same ball park performance wise as the Ivy Bridge HD4000 IGP (last gen Intel integrated GPU). The chip itself is a minor rework of the Fermi based GT 525M. AC4 is purely just a little to much for the thing to handle even on low settings, the new global lighting puts it a big step above the previous titles when it comes to performance.

Try using a monitoring utility like MSI Afterburner, run through an area until you see the problem for an extended period then check the graphs for the GPU. Check to see if the GPU is maintaining it's full clock speed, that the usage is consistent and the GPU memory isn't hitting a wall (common problems when framerate goes off a cliff).

so fps is improved when eagle vision mode is on, not a lot goes to 14 fps

Found your problem.

Yeah...laptop gaming is a treacherous road filled with conmen and pitfalls. Tread lightly, my friend.

@greggd: Not only that but trying to run a demanding game that doesn't scale all that well, unlike something like BF 4, on a laptop in hopes of reaching some console parity is a fool's errand

Also

Recommended configuration:

• Operating System: Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8 (both 32/64bit versions)
• Processor: Intel Core i5 2400S @ 2.5 GHz or AMD Phenom II x4 940 @ 3.0 GHz or better
• RAM: 4GB or more
• Video card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 or AMD Radeon HD 5850 (1024MB VRAM with Shader Model 5.0) or better

Supported video cards at the time of release*:

• Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 or better, GT400, GT500, GT600, GT700 series or AMD Radeon HD4870 or better, HD5000, HD6000, HD7000 series

*Laptop versions of these cards may work but are not officially supported. Latest GeForce drivers tested: 320.49 for all series. Latest Radeon drivers tested: 13.1 for Radeon HD4000, 13.4 for Radeon HD5000 and above.

That's kind of implicit, but yes. Absolutely.

Notebook Video Card Reviews

According to this site the game is unplayable with your video card. A 630m is not designed to play video games on, sure there are some games that run on lowest detail settings (DOTA 2, or Team Fortress 2), but you need a proper PC if you want to game.

Harsh mate. There is always Unreal tournament, quake 3 and CS 1.6

On that site it says i should be able to get 18-23 fps, which really isnt ideal but is a whole lot better than 7. And I would get a proper PC but most of my needs require portability.

I dunno what some of you guys are talking about. I have a gt650 m (I'm guessing its pretty close to 630m performance wise?) and my AC4 runs consistently at ~30 fps and sometimes even hits 40 - 50 fps in less taxing areas. Drops to 25s in heavy jungles.

I run it on High settings, 1600x900 (SSAO etc off, everything else on high. Volumetric fog, reflections On/ high)

That number value of 20 is a HUGE leap. You know how everyone absolutely loved the hell out of the GT 8800 a few years ago? I went for the GT 8600, thinking I could get similar results. No sir. Hell, my GTX 770 is pretty great, but the GTX 780 is a massive increase in power over my card. And I'm fine with that, but you have to understand that there is a very large discrepancy at work, here. All you have to do is compare prices. There's a reason why the price jumps with even a single integer increase. And I'm not trying to talk down to you, or the OP, or anyone else who has made this mistake. I certainly have, myself. But you just need to do the research before taking the plunge on hardware. I learned that one the hard way. :P

The 650M is an order of magnitude more powerful, it has 4 times the number of shader units more than double the fillrate and nearly 3 times the memory bandwidth. The 630M is one of the most pointless pieces of silicon ever produced, it's slower than Intel's current integrated GPU (the HD5000 series).

May have to spend the coin and upgrade, which i was considering doing anyway.

Anyone have alienware laptops? Are they worth the big money?

@spyder335: Don't be crazy, you could build a top of the line desktop for the price of a good gaming laptop that will age faster than a Wii U.

Despite Brad claiming that it's a "freebie" these days I found lowering the AA made a significant FPS difference on my machine.

I don't think I've ever heard him make that claim, shader based AA is basically free (FXAA, SMAA, MLAA) however multi-sampling and super sampling are still expensive as hell and always will be.

I've heard him say it in some podcast, but who knows which at this point. Either way there was a big different for me between FXAA and SMAA - it was either play it on 1920x1080 with lower AA or settle for a significantly lower resolution for me. My system is sort of weird though as everything apart from the graphics card is quite good so some things get carried but others are just too much.

Also make sure to turn off god-rays. It increased my frame rates quite a bit.

What are God Rays exactly, I mean I assume they are beams of light but when do they show up?

God Rays are rays of light like when the sun is shining through clouds on a semi-cloudy day. In Assassin's Creed 4, it when light is shining through the trees especially in the jungle settings.

This game has horrible adaptive vsync. If people with high end rigs are having frame rate issues then it possible that's the reason why. On my 770, I was getting 30 when running through the jungle. I know the card can handle 60 perfectly fine. The results of googling shows that it's because the adaptive vsync was kicking in. To disable the adaptive vsync, I had to download a program called D3DOverride to enable triple buffering, which forced adaptive vsync off.

As for the OP's issue, it could also be thermal throttling. If the CPU is heating up too high, it'll start to downclock itself. It's the same with the video card.

Trees, I'm pretty sure. Or other meshed overhangs.

I'll have to turn those off and see what's up. I've outright turned vsync off in the menu, unless that option is somehow separate from the adaptive vsync - although I doubt it since I see tearing constantly but it's better than a trash framerate.

I can run SC: Blacklist on Ultra with v-sync on and it's buttery smooth, but ACIV performs really horribly on my machine with v-sync off and a lot of the settings turned to medium, especially when on-foot on the islands. I think this port is just poorly done. Should be running a lot better with a 770 GTX.

@rorie: agreed, how is it they can make a game that runs fine on an 8 year old console, but runs like crap on fairly new pcs?

Sounds like someone's never played JC2 Multiplayer. No. They aren't. Not even close. Build your own desktop PC. Gaming laptops are too bulky and have too shitty battery lives to be functionally-mobile, anyway.

What CPU? The game is fairly draw heavy which means it hammers the driver a lot more frequently.

@korwin: It's an i7 920, which is a few years old, but I've been running performance monitors and it doesn't look like it ever spikes the CPU. Maybe that's the issue, but I'm not sure. Although uPlay manages to freeze my entire system when I start it up, so who knows.

The Xbox One version gets a big drop when running around outdoor environments in a storm. The weather effects and the environments are too much for that fat slab to handle.

@development: size and weight of laptops never really bother me its more the convenience of moving it around, I tend to need it to be mobile, work can send me too the other side of the country on long drives, even to foreign countries and usually the laptop is my only source of entertainment.

@korwin: @greggd: Alright then, thanks for clearing that up :P Yeah I assumed that 630 - 650 m wouldn't be much of a jump considering the rest of the specs are almost similar and that it's a laptop too

Yeah, they're the rays of light that shine through the clouds and trees on to the environment below and you, making parts lighter on some parts. It's a bit silly and you won't even notice it that much when turned on.

The problem with CPU bottlenecks in games is that the don't always rear their heads in the form of spikes or high usage curves. Traditional Direct3D API rendering relies on the driver stack to send the instructions to the GPU after them filtering through first the renderer and then DX, that stack runs entirely out of CPU time and as such can only process so many draw calls per cycle. It's not an intense load but you can only feed the driver so many commands before things start the back up and performance drops like only a hot bangin' beat can. You don't see this kind of problem in consoles because the game software is able to directly address the GPU much like you would a CPU and allows you to cut out the CPU/Driver middle man. You'd be surprised how much time CPU's actually sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for the next opportunity to feed the GPU in games instead of being put to proper use.

It's actually the most important feature of the new Mantle API that AMD has developed. That allows developers on PC to directly address the GPU from the application level which in turn removes CPU draw/batch call limitations essentially removing the driver bottleneck (also freeing up more raw grunt from the GPU is a nice bonus). If you interested and want to get your PC nerd on for 40 minutes I've put a video bellow of a talk a dev team did at the APU13 conference where they go into this stuff in much better detail than I can (it's reasonably high level... which is nice since I don't know a thing about coding :D )