We all know that Ubisoft is a company that is well known for its unoptimized PC games. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla had performance issues, the latest Far Cry games have been mainly relying on one CPU core/thread, most of its games use VMProtect and Denuvo which bring an additional CPU/memory overhead, and the list goes on. And, funnily enough, Ubisoft states that some of the most popular third-party programs may be causing performance or crashing issues.
Yesterday, Ubisoft support shared the following tweet. As the team specifically says, the following third-party programs may introduce performance or crashing issues.
Here is the list of programs that Ubisoft shared.
In short, Ubisoft is blaming all of the third-party programs that PC users currently use. Instead of trying to fix these compatibility issues, Ubisoft suggests disabling these programs. And that’s our biggest issue here. Ubisoft, and every company, should make sure that its games are compatible with these programs (or that they at least don’t cause any performance issues).
Ubisoft should also identify and fix the stuttering or performance issues of its games. For instance, Assassin’s Creed Origins had fewer stuttering issues in its Denuvo-free version. Far Cry 6 also has stuttering issues on both PC and consoles when loading new areas. Watch Dogs Legion also initially had CPU-related issues (though a post-launch update improved things). These are not the result of a third-party program running in the background (unless we list their DRMs which Ubisoft has, cleverly, avoided mentioning).
What’s also ironic here is that Ubisoft has listed BitTorrent and uTorrent. So, how on Earth could these programs introduce performance issues (unless we’re talking about online-only games. If you download at maximum speed, you’ll have latency issues. But that can also happen when downloading via Steam)? Because to me, this feels like VMProtect and Denuvo possibly causing issues/crashes the moment they detect a torrent client.
For what it’s worth, Ubisoft has not stated yet whether it will fix the performance/optimization issues of Far Cry 6. The team hasn’t even shared any news or details about the game’s first post-launch update.
Lastly, other companies have also listed these programs for potentially causing performance/crashing issues. And, to Ubisoft’s credit, MSI Afterburner can indeed cause launch crashes. However, it does not introduce any performance issues. Still, and if you have trouble launching a game, we suggest taking a look at the list.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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