Assassin's Creed PC

Image Quality Settings and Performance

While we're inclined to say that AC only requires a "midrange" graphics card these days -- both the 8800 GT and HD 3870 can be purchased for under $200 -- there are still plenty of people out there that don't have sufficiently fast hardware to run this game at maximum settings. Lacking appropriate hardware to test a variety of other graphics cards, I instead opted to look at how the graphics settings affect performance and image quality. Below you will find image galleries showing the various settings tested as well as how those settings affect the image quality.

Subjectively, we can state of few things. First, at the lowest detail setting AC looks pretty awful. This is not a knock against the game, but it's important to remember that on low-end hardware it's essentially impossible to perform all of the high-end graphics effects. Without basic shadows and lighting, AC looks like something that would have been state-of-the-art about six or seven years ago. (The same could be said of most modern games.)

Bumping up the graphics detail to "low" enables basic (static) lighting effects, and AC looks substantially better. We still wouldn't recommend playing this way if you can avoid it, but at least it's no longer an eyesore. Note also that you can enable a high level of detail with only a moderate performance hit, which would improve the overall image quality slightly. (See below for more details.)

At our "medium" settings, the game finally starts to look like a modern title. It's likely that owners of graphics cards like the GeForce 8600 series and HD 2600 series will be best off running at medium settings, and they should be able to achieve reasonable performance at 1280x1024 (1280x720 with black bars on the top and bottom).

Finally, at maximum detail the shadow range is extended, texture quality is improved, and you get a very attractive rendition of 12th century humanity. Performance drops by roughly 20% compared to "medium" settings, and as already discussed enabling anti-aliasing will further reduce performance.

At all graphics detail settings above one, you can also choose to enable or disable "Post FX". The major area this affects is the presence or lack of motion blur when you're moving at a high rate of speed -- i.e. diving from a high point into a pile of hay or galloping on a horse. Disabling this did not appear to have a major impact on performance.

While reducing detail settings will improve performance to a certain degree, it's also important to note that CPU and overall system performance remain factors. We did some initial benchmarking with our quad-core QX6850 (really an overclocked Q6600) to see what sort of performance we were looking at. That's no slouch of a processor, and yet maximum performance even at minimum detail settings appears to top out at just over 100 FPS. Obviously, lower-end systems would not perform as well, so make sure you have sufficient CPU horsepower. The CPU-limited nature of the game is also apparent by looking at the single versus dual-GPU scores; with a 3.0GHz Core 2 processor at 1680x1050, the largest performance improvement from a second GPU is only 25%: SLI at "Medium" settings; CrossFire tops out at only a 13% performance boost.

When we perform the same test as above but leave the LOD at four (the maximum setting), it's no surprise that performance drops as we become more CPU bound. (Level of Detail influences the draw distance and amount of detail seen on distant object, among other things.) Other than that, there's little difference in performance scaling. Due to the CPU-limited nature, we again see lower settings running faster with a single GPU than SLI/CrossFire.