With the recent announcment that Assasin's Creed: Unity is 990p and 30fps on both the XB1 and PS4 it left a lot of gamers in the "pissed off" category.  Now with the rumor that Dragon Age might be the same way, it my actually cause a few websites to go offline with the hate.

SO, besides the M$ marketing deals or some back door agreement, what is the real reason?

I am hoping that a few technical people could help us all out by providing some PROOF that Ubisoft is just making some BS excuses about the CPU bound problems with its game design.

Some links to credible(not GAF) sources and maybe some links or even dropped in info showing/explaining how the CPU doesn't matter.

Until this has been put out there, the fanboys on one side will say its possible, and the fanboys on the other will say they are crazy.

If you can provide proof for either side of the debate, bring it on.  If not, don't bother to say the other side is wrong.

I have been looking all over google and have read a few different things on this, and have yet to find anyone that can prove anything one way or another.

Nobody can prove anything

But Assassin's Creed IV ran better on PS4 than Xbox One

As has almost every other PS4 game. Nobody can see any reason why they wouldn't push it to 1080p on PS4. But it's a trend, AC Unity, FIFA and Dragon Age all have Microsoft deals. All the same

AC IV, PES and MGS aren't, and that's where the PS4 has a decent advantage

You're not going to find any facts until documents are leaked. Even then, it there may not be any proof if Ubi are being paid to do this, or just being lazy.

Contract clause Ubi maybe unintentionally got stuck in.

MS might have added that as a marketing partner Ubi must ensure X1 version is as good as any other, no big deal really. Well UBi agreed because they though they could but they tried and failed now they are forced to limit it to 900p 30fps.

Would explain why the pr is so bad, there's no good way to spin this and it was unexpected.

Thats not the case. n the hardware side of things this can be proven. Simply put, their si no reason why the PS4 and XB1 should perform the exact same way. None what so ever. Its only possible if a developer went out of their way to make that happen.

As for Ubisoft being paid to do this... I would just say its not something I would put beyond MS. Just look at the conversation and see if its so hard to believe.

MS: Hey, you guys partnered with sony for watchdogs this year, how about you partner with us for AC this year, its already an established franchise anyways.
UBI: That sounds good, what you got in mind?
MS:  Game will be marketed exclusively on the XB1 platform and all demos and previews of the game must be rnning on the XB1
UBU: ok.....
MS: we will of course cover all the marketing costs and cover the cost of development for the XB1 platform, you will also pay us $5 instead of $12 on royalties for every copy of the game sold on the XB1. But there is a catch though...
UBI: Whats that?
MS: we deman platfrom parity, specwise and content wise. You can't have the PS4 version running at a higher resolution or having extra special content.
UBI: fair enough... that could work. You got a deal.

It's not impossible but who knows.

Thinking about it though, it would be pretty fucked up cause that would actually mean that MS paid Ubisoft to take something away that people that bought the PS4 actually wanted, to give people that bought an X1 something that they should not care about, at the very least if they are rational.

It's not that I don't believe that that could have happened , but it's only one of a number of possibilities

Equally Ubi could have got the game running at 900p on both and decided not to do more work on that aspect. Maybe Far Cry 4 needs help running smoother, so they put more people on that? Or maybe there will be other differences. We'll find out in a month if there is actual parity for starters, the why question may never be answered

No, it's not a parity clause. It's developers electing to tailor games to the lowest common denominator, in order to avoid having to answer to Microsoft, or Sony, or their fans. Which makes it even worse, in my opinion. The Parity clause that MS has with devs, is only related to when titles launch, unless I'm completely mistaken.

I think it's impossible to prove anything. Still, not only the PS4 is clearly ahead in term of hardware, but also the XOne has a limitation in term of memory speed (for the main RAM), and memory size (for the quick ESRAM). So it really makes sense that the XOne is sub 1080p, and that the PS4 can output at 1080p what the XOne output a 900p.

In fact, it should not perform the same way. The only reason it could would possibly be a very intensive CPU task. That's what Ubisoft try to use as a reason when they say: "It's not the number of polygons that affect the framerate. We could be running at 100fps if it was just graphics, but because of AI, we're still limited to 30 frames per second."
What they are telling is that they give a priority to the AI so high, they have a target in term of AI so much higher than any game in the past in this genre, that they were OK to lower by a large margin the resolution, effects and framerate not just on the PS4, but also on the XOne. I call that a total bullshit.

As for the real reason, there is no problem having a higher resolution on a similar and better hardware. But it's impossible to say if they did that for MS, or for MS clients.

If it's the CPU holding them back from pushing more res or fps then that's understandable. IF they would just say "but PS4 will have better foliage/shadows/draw distance/etc." then I would be fine with that. The GPU power has to go towards something and THERE the PS4 has a definite advantage that should be used.