Requirements for Assassin's Creed Shadows listed.
Requirements for Assassin's Creed Shadows listed.
I plan to run it on my Lenovo Legion 5 Pro (2021 with RTX 3070). The 1080p Meduim preset might be upscaled to around 626p, which even with DLSS 4 won’t look great. Still, I think it’ll be smoother than many UE5 titles that cause stuttering.
It's a UBI game, which means they packed in a lot of DRM that drains performance and really harms PC speed. You shouldn't get too excited. It's really disappointing that a 3060 needs to run a game scaled up at medium settings to hit 60fps. That’s just awful.
I have no room for disagreement (¬_¬). It's important to push users toward using ray tracing. At lower levels it restricts RT only for cutscenes, but higher levels introduce additional rendering. Hopefully it won't be the same as Indiana Jones and restrict games to RTX graphics, though that sounds like another marketing tactic to push costly hardware. Don't expect it to let RT be turned off completely, and honestly PC specs haven't always been accurate from my side—it looks like the Medium Preset is labeled "Recommended" with upscaling and all at 1080p, which is quite poor. Particularly problematic for consoles such as PS5 and XSX; it's hard to picture how frustrating it would be to upscale 1080p using FSR.
Consoles generally work well. Publishers are now relying mainly on upscaling to compensate for PC optimization issues.
Uncomfortable reality. Typically PS5 and XSX in these "hard" games run at 1080p Dynamic (or with FSR) for 60fps, or upscaled to 4K at 30fps. Only the PS5 Pro seems to handle PSSR well, but be aware of its struggles with ray-traced shadows. Still, if the game is tough enough to match the quality, I’d prefer avoiding stuttering like in UE5 titles. If smooth performance is possible at 1080p with DLSS on high settings, I’d be willing to try it despite the unrealistic demands. However, after watching Star Wars Outlaws, I noticed its image quality was only average and it felt overly taxing—similar issues might affect AC shadows too.
I think these details are too general to form a solid opinion. It mentions "dynamic resolution and upscaling" but it's unclear what they actually mean. Perhaps the suggested specs mainly keep things at 1080p native resolution and dynamic resolution only sometimes kicks in. I really want to see improvements in draw distance and LOD performance, which the engine usually struggles with. From what I've noticed, AC Origins and Odyssey were quite demanding on the CPU, possibly due to LODs and draw distance. Valhalla managed to lower the CPU usage but introduced noticeable pop-in. Even with the highest LOD settings, the grass in Valhalla appears as a flat, very low-resolution texture near the camera, which seriously affects the game's visual quality. I hope they can address this with Shadows.
Usually it's better than just boosting graphics and using upscaling to achieve a solid frame rate.
I’d prefer Ghost of Tsushima, but AC Shadows didn’t catch my attention. The trailers and gameplay didn’t impress me. It feels quite old, and the graphics aren’t great. Plus, Black Flag was the last solid entry in that series.
I thought I was supposed to receive this with the B580, but I wasn’t really motivated enough to explore ways to get it for free.