When the game entered development the 2080 was the king of the hill. Devs plan for the highest settings based on what they think will be the hardware at the time of release.
Because of the pandemic, the GPU timelines got messed up. We probably should have had a 4090ti or 5xxx series already released or in the very near future in the case of the latter.
Well, if the game entered development when the RTX 2080 was #1, they should've set the game up to require no more than that at 1440p. Some would say that the fact they didn't means this is a case of dev laziness but I don't think that's what happened. From what I've seen the root cause of pretty much
everything that goes wrong with media releases is some clueless executive suit making a bad decision to try and cut costs. I've seen it in video games, movies, TV shows and printed content. The people who are knowledgeable and have passion are almost never the ones put in charge. The companies that
do put people with knowledge and passion in charge benefit
greatly from that decision.
Perfect examples of this are Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Jensen Huang and Lisa Su. Having an actual computer scientist running everything paid
huge dividends for those corporations because they inherently knew a bad idea or decision when they saw it. Sure, not everything they did turned out all that well but look what happened to Intel when they were led by "business scientists" instead of computer scientists. Look what happened when Lisa Su was put at the helm of AMD and look at the meteoric rise of nVidia under Jensen Huang.
I guarantee you that whoever was put in charge of AFOP at Ubisoft isn't a top-level programmer themselves. If they were, we'd be seeing something more like Baldur's Gate 3, a game that was done
properly.