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Nvidia and Ubisoft Renew GameWorks Partnership With 4 PC Releases Including 'Assassin's Creed Unity'

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Much to the delight and/or sadness of PC gaming enthusiasts, Nvidia and Ubisoft are teaming up for another round of titles augmented with proprietary GameWorks technologies.

Four highly anticipated games from Ubisoft  -- Assassin's Creed Unity, Far Cry 4, The Crew, and Tom Clancy's The Division -- will incorporate Nvidia's GameWorks libraries. GameWorks encompasses a suite of visual effects engineered by Nvidia, who then works with studios directly to add these flourishes to titles at various stages of development.

Examples of these effects are TXAA antialiasing (which serves up smoother animations), advanced DirectX 11 tessellation (adding realism to textures and objects), and PhysX which brings more accuracy and immersion to things like particles and smoke.

A fair amount of controversy has erupted around the use of GameWorks, specifically from Nvidia rival AMD, who recently told Forbes that it "represents a clear and present threat to gamers by deliberately crippling performance on AMD products." Nvidia fired back, stressing that those claims were "crazy."

“Working with NVIDIA has enabled us to bring an enhanced gameplay experience to our PC players,” said Tony Key, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Ubisoft. “We look forward to continuing our partnership with NVIDIA on our biggest upcoming titles.”

While there's no argument that Nvidia's GameWorks enhances the visuals of PC titles, Ubisoft's PC version of Watch Dogs was universally panned at launch -- not critically, but from a performance point of view. Digital Foundry concluded that "even on powerful gaming hardware" Watch Dogs exhibited excessive stuttering and aggressive use of Video memory. "Even going nuclear and throwing a top-end 290X at the problem didn't produce a satisfactory experience," according to their analysis.

While this is strictly anecdotal, several of my readers have expressed disdain over Ubisoft's PC releases in general, citing issues like poor performance or the company's UPlay service, which was down for a good portion of Watch Dogs' launch day.

Ubisoft has promised to patch Watch Dogs in the very near future, but hopefully they can work more closely with Nvidia on high profile releases like Assassin's Creed Unity not just on integrating GameWorks, but better optimizing their PC titles. For their part, Nvidia assures me they're working with Ubisoft post-launch to improve performance on the PC version of Watch Dogs.

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