A few weeks ago Ubisoft announced that it would release a patch for their PC ports of their highly successful stealth action game Assassin's Creed. However, instead of fixing bugs or adding new features, the patch is to remove the support for DirectX10.1 graphics. According to the initial announcement about the patch the DirectX10.1 support in the game added "a render pass during post-effect which is costly."

While the patch has yet to be released as of this writing, some are accusing Ubisoft of playing hardware politics with this proposed DirectX10.1 removal from the game. Why? Because at the moment the only graphics cards in stores that support DirectX10.1 are cards from AMD's ATI unit (specifically the Radeon HD 3000 hardware). Performance issues with Assassin's Creed were reported on NVIDIA graphics cards. The problem is that Assassin's Creed is part of NVIDIA's "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" marketing program where the company makes deals with game publishers to add their logo and ad support for a number of PC games.

So did NVIDIA ask Ubisoft to remove the DirectX10.1 feature from Assassin's Creed? Officially the answer is, "No." TG Daily contacted both Ubisoft and NVIDIA reps and both denied any sort of external influence, saying that the decision was made by the game's development team. The author feels that the game simply was not finished in terms of proper code and that the programming team put in the DirectX10.1 support without making sure the game would work on normal DirectX10 hardware. It just goes to prove that developing PC games without taking the tons of different hardware combinations can still be tricky.