Assassin’s Creed: Shadows – Technical Review PC, PS5, PS5 Pro
Share the Story:
Ubisoft’s Pioneering Legacy
It was often rumoured that AC would head east into the land of the rising sun, they came true this year with Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. Coming on the back of similar titles that have taken much from the long running series themselves, such as Rise of the Ronin and of course Sucker Punch’s 2020 magnum opus, Ghost of Tsushima, an obvious inspiration for this current Ubisoft team, as much as AC did for Sucker Punch. Packed with upgrades to the Anvil engine, dual protagonist to journey through the game, and a swath of new features including the return of base camp building. Is this a new leap forward for the series or more of the same, let’s dive in.
Ubisoft have a long and arduous history right back before the 16-bit days of the Atari ST and Amiga. Ubiquitous by name and by nature, within their DNA has always been a desire, passion and skill to push forward, standout and innovate. The Assassins Creed series, created by Patrice Désilets, Jade Raymond back in 2007 during the PS360 era was certainly true of that mantra. The series has straddled the line of historical fan fiction and enjoyable, open ended stealth gameplay with varying levels of success. But from a technical standpoint, it started life as a leader and has often pushed the medium forward with rendering, AI, choice and believable worlds. From the 1st, the 3rd, Black Flag’s Sea fairing and certainly 2014’s Unity which still stands proud within the franchise on a graphical perspective. With much of the modern games, including Shadows, relying heavily on the work and updates to that same Anvil engine that has powered every entry since inception.
Raising the Hammer
Shadows is the first exclusive to current gen consoles and modern PC GPU’s , offering the biggest technical tick box in Ray Tracing, Ray Traced Global Illumination (RTGI) in fact, that complements or replaces the Image Based Lighting (IBL) from the prior games. Along with Ray Traced reflections, strand-based hair, Ubisoft’s own version of Nanite in Micro polygons and a greatly enhanced procedural destruction system to enhance the sword wielding combat within. On this front, the visual quality and art is balanced well with clear muses of wind, foliage movement and interaction being a core focus taken from Tsunami isle. But, the split protagonists mean you have 2 distinct ways to play that reward their unique strengths and punish you for their weaknesses. The game scales well, using the PC version, we have a polished, clean and detailed front end and menu. No intrusive shader compilation is visible, likely an a-sync process, no performance stutters were noted during hours of play across multiple machines. The menu is the standard high quality Ubisoft level, offering intricate tweaking with a visual representation of what each setting does. Ray Tracing can be set to hideout only, WorldGI or GI and specular (reflections) then beyond this many settings offer low, medium, high, very high and ultra high. These broad levels of scaling help the game run across a breadth of machines, from my entry level 6GB RTX4050 laptop, right up to the top end 32GB RTX5090. In between we get AMD’s RX6800, the RTX4070 super and of course the PS5, PS5 Pro, SX and SS. But rest assured that you can tweak the game well to balance quality and performance, helped by a full suite of upscalers and frame generation that can be mixed and matched with Anvils own TAA, DLSS3, FSR3, XeSS which offer a good trade off between image quality but none achieve the perfect level
A little Ray of Light
The prior games baked textures and IBL is a good solution, present in prior games and relies on runtime dynamic image probes, taken from fixed points of day. These sample spots are like cubemaps, and scattered across the world they deliver a convincing level of sun and moon light bounce light from exterior and interiors. The RT boost offers two key benefits, this GI is now more accurate with multiple bounces factored in allowing more concave areas to receive some or more light, along with it dynamically shifting based on occluders within the world, such as screen doors. This bring more light and shadow along with shifts of light as objects move. More impactful though is the RTAmbient Occlusion element which adds far better self Occlusion and depth to static and dynamic objects. Both indoor and outdoor are enhanced by this feature and it can greatly improve the games visual impact, specifically on interiors with light coming from outside. It significantly increases material reactions from both diffuse, and specular, although this is not free. With it costing around 33% of performance using my RTX4050, RTX2070 and RX6800 GPUs.
The key visual updates continue with Reflections, which can be delivered via the long standing Screen Space Reflection solution (SSLR) or Ray Traced reflections. These suffer less from artifacts and more physically accurate. They are welcome non the less, but certainly a balance to choose if the circa 15% performance cost is required from your rig or console. Microploygons are much like Nanite from UE5 and mesh shaders, anvil now supports their own solution. These do the same thing, clustering objects into batches that are constantly shifting to balance load with quality. This means static meshes such as rocks, houses etc all seamlessly scale up as you move through the world. Grass. Foliage, and other animated or skinned meshes still use standard LoDs so these can shift and pop still. But so long as the level is around high the world suffers far less from pop in, imposter billboard swaps and jarring shifts of objects.
Procedural destruction, like the RT features, do seem to share elements from The Snowdrop Engine from massive. Used from the Division, Avatar and Star Wars last year. Here though, the solution covers Katana slices, bamboo cuts and even beheadings, although here are mostly canned animation sets. Although not exhaustive, it is adds far more physics, interaction in the world and can improve combat, even if the persistence can be short once destroyed.
Hair splines or strands is the last big boost, Naoe gets the full L’Oréal treatment, with Dense geometric hair polygons that collide, sway, reflect light and even cast shadows. Other Npcs can also use the system with equally pleasing affect. On Consoles this is always enabled in the real-time cut-scenes which are capped to 30 in all modes even on PC without a mid. But on PC you can turn this off fully, these are disabled in gameplay in the performance mode on consoles even on PS5 Pro, but balanced and quality mode run these during gameplay.
A Cut Above
AI and combat are the weakest point, combat is wooden lacks the style, finesse and skill of GoT, more like Rise of Ronin and prior games. Weapon range is good, choice of moves to expand, finishers etc, but more variety is required. Enemies can spam the hard hits with no reaction or physicality, including longer range weapons, not helped by poor AI that lacks nuance, skill or awareness. Numbers and resistance to hits are really where the toughness comes from,with the classic sponges in certain areas just becoming a slog.
The engine performance scaling is good, some options cost more than others, aside textures and resolution. As noted, RT costs approx. 33% off vs max but in my tests, I see no visual or, much, performance difference going from Medium to High or Very High on RT, with Low to Medium being the most impactful on a visual scale and performance cost.
Shadow maps can offer approx. 16% higher performance over ultra shadows, medium is the best option. Lighting can be costly, Low vs medium costs around 2% but medium to high is a heftier 8% more, ultra is a further 13% on that, making it almost as expensive as RT off vs on going from low to Ultra, at whooping 25.7%. Medium is best balance.
Hair can offer 13% gain going from Strands off to Very High all characters, player character only is the best bang for buck, costing approx 6% off versus on, which is what we choose and matches consoles in quality and balanced mode. Textures for 12GB GPU’s or lower than texture streaming and virtual textures need to set medium, 8-6GB cards need to be low, 16GB or higher can max these out.
Finally, LOD Micropolygons and grass can be an obvious cost, with console sticking to high to reduce pop-in and this costs approx. 5% over Low but beyond this ultra-high can cost a further 9% making it over 15% going from low to ultra for a small gain, but High is the best balance stopping most of the popping and imposter swaps in the world for a small frame time cost. Consoles run this in performance mode but move to very high in balanced and quality mode. This setting can impact CPU and memory so be aware of that in the performance section.
Console settings and modes
Much of what I have covered so far is true for consoles and PC, taking my PS5 and PS5 Pro as the best example of that we have 3 modes on each to choose from. Performance (60fps), Balanced(40fps), Quality(30fps) and only quality targets 4K on PS5 using anvils own TAAU to increase that Dynamic Resolution Scaling (DRS) level to 4K. From many counts it operates between 1240p and 1620p but runs RTGI in the world but SSR reflections, this is also true in the hideout, which is capped at 30fps on all modes once you enter. The PS5 Pro targets the same 4K output, again using TAAU or Sony’s own PSSR which can be toggled on and off as required. It is often within the same ranges of resolution, but the console offers the full RT experience, with reflections now being handled by RT both in the open world and the hideout, which is still capped at 30fps even on the Pro.
Balanced targets around 1440-1080p approx levels on PS5. This is certainly softer at times but aside a Small LoD cutback, no RT at all now on PS5 and PS5 Pro retains RTGI and Reflections and can still hover in the same regions. Lower hair settings and possibly shadows but could be resolution related it looks very close. It does this at a new 40fps rate so long as you have a 120hz screen on PS5 and Pro.
Performance is last but no means least, now the PS5 only tops out at 1240p and can scale down to 720p, this is by far the softest mode and loses hair splines, lower LoD, shadows and again only RTGI in hideout means we do notice the sacrifices for that 60fps target. PS5 Pro can scale down to 900p levels but can also achieve 1440p (which appears to be the new target here). Again with a choice of TAAU or PSSR, but with PSSR the resolution never goes below 856p in my counts. The PS5 Pro manages to keep RTGI operational at least and offers a slightly sharper image than base PS5.
PS5 in its performance mode does remain close to that level pretty well, but the game appears to have some random issues that impact performance without glaringly obvious causes. Some are streaming issues, some are likely related to the Micropolygon work per frame, others may be RT, DRS and plain old fill-rate or bandwidth related, but we can have some 33ms spikes at times that can cause some judder with readouts never going below 50fps in my tests, they are not frequent but happen enough to notice them when they do.
PSSR costs approx 9.6% in performance, like for like, over TAAU. Likely similar base resolutions, but we do see more dips in the Performance mode using PSSR than TAAU with the trade off being superior image quality.
Balanced and Quality on PS5 Pro lock well to their 40 or 30fps target with some skips and dips that are largely in perceivable to most player. As PS5 Pro likely has headroom in these modes, the higher base resolutions mean PSSR has a noticeable, but smaller image boost over TAAU but no real cost ti performance now. As such PSSR makes the most sense in Performance but can be the only mode you notice the cost.
Summary
The AC series has been around for almost 20 years now, and in that time the series has grown in size, scale and rendering quality. With AC Shadows they have ramped up the technical tool kit, with a very obvious leaning towards key areas of the Snow Drop engine from massive, Volumetric clouds, procedural destruction and of course RT GI and Reflections. But, the core engine limits, gameplay loop and combat do not push forward as much as the veneer cover. AI is poor, robotic attacks, basic state models, clumps of enemies standing around and it feels far older in that score than the huge strides taken elsewhere. But most impactful are the bugs, many times kills and assassinations would fail, traversal can get you stuck on odd surfaces as it tracks an obvious spline through the scenery. Horse travel feels the most jarring, but combat also lacks the skill, range and flamboyant timing and parry that we go in GoT, and it is impossible to not compare the two. And on that score it falls short of the mark. It does still look stunning with excellent materials, lighting, foliage draw and models, albeit some areas in the cutscenes can range from very good, or not so good. But the demands on all hardware still feel higher compared to the visual return and performance, certainly on the RTX5090 area and, far less in the PS5 Pro, but the PSSR and balanced RT updates have shown there is clear room for improvement and the team will likely continue to patch and improve. But after a near 6 month delay, I would have hoped for a slightly higher level of quality, but I am very glad, as the version we would have got last year would have been far worse and not as polished as this version.