There have been nearly five years between the releases of Assassin's Creed Shadows and Valhalla. Sure, there was also Assassin's Creed Mirage a couple of years ago, but it was evidently a smaller (albeit well-made) project that did not include major advancements, especially from a technical standpoint.
As such, the imminent launch of the next chapter in Ubisoft's premiere franchise finally shows us what the five-year gap looks like in terms of technical breakthroughs for the company's proprietary Anvil engine. While several games within Ubisoft have adopted Massive's stunning Snowdrop engine, the Assassin's Creed IP has remained staunchly loyal to Anvil. Before Assassin's Creed Shadows, we might have called that foolish, given the visual gap between the two. However, that's no longer the case following this new release. Ever since Gamescom 2024, the developers at Ubisoft Quebec (the studio that led the efforts on this game, previously known for Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Immortals Fenyx Rising) have banged the drum on this being the most visually advanced installment to date. They weren't kidding.
Asasssin's Creed Shadows is the first franchise entry to support ray traced effects, and it does so thoroughly. While this is no path traced game, its implementation of ray traced global illumination is one of the best I've seen in non-path traced games yet. On PC, players can select various levels of pervasiveness, up to diffuse and specular ray traced GI being applied everywhere in the game. This is obviously the most taxing option but also by far the most game-changing from a visual standpoint. RTGI also adds great ambient occlusion, and when coupled with ray traced reflections, the presentation offers the most impactful ray traced effects developers could choose, grounding the game's graphics in photorealism to a degree that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
But the advancements of the latest Anvil engine are not at all limited to ray tracing. Ubisoft developed its own form of virtual geometry (first seen with Nanite in Epic's Unreal Engine 5), which they are calling Micropolygons. Like with Nanite, the goal is allowing developers to render more polygons with more level of details in a scalable fashion. Indeed, PC users can tweak this setting (like many others, as shown in the gallery below) from Low to Ultra.
There's more. The environmental destructibility has been greatly increased; there's amazing physically animated vegetation, awesome particle effects, and dynamic wind that even affects fluids. Assassin's Creed Shadows also supports terrain deformation, which is mostly noticeable during winter, when the characters will appropriately wade through snowy fields while leaving marks of their passage.
The game practically checks all the right boxes, including full support for all available upscaling and frame generation technologies from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel; full support for Dolby Atmos and DTS:X spatial sound systems; full support for the DualSense controller's unique features such as Adaptive Triggers and its speaker; and a great implementation of HDR, which further elevates the game's visuals if you are equipped with a good enough HDR display.
As I've said, this is one of the most graphically and technically impressive games available right now, except for a handful of path traced titles. But how does it run? Very well, considering all the above. On an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D+NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 powered PC, the game performed almost flawlessly. Through the NVIDIA app override, users can update DLSS Super Resolution and Frame Generation to the latest transformer models while also bumping the Frame Generation from the game's default 2x to Multi Frame Generation (3x or 4x).
With the maximum 4x mode, when running the built-in benchmark, NVIDIA FrameView reported 173 average frames per second at native 4K with DLAA enabled. Beware that the game itself will register a lower frame rate, likely because it does not recognize the Multi Frame Generation yet. More importantly than the mere frame rate average is the fact that stuttering was minimal, with a relatively modest difference between maximum and minimum frame rate (just 30 frames per second).
Multi Frame Generation x3 is quite a bit slower when it comes to the average frame rate, stopping at 135 frames per second. It's still, however, considerably faster than regular 2x Frame Generation, which stops at 97 frames per second on average. Granted, the game still plays very smoothly like this, a testament to the developer's work.
I will refer you to Francesco's review for a judgment on the game's content and features, but from a technical standpoint, Assassin's Creed Shadows is a success. While I'd still give the edge to Star Wars Outlaws when it comes to graphics in Ubisoft games, mostly thanks to its inclusion of RTX Direct Illumination, this comes very close. The delays (the game was originally slated to launch on November 15) most likely helped with polishing, too. Hopefully, other developers will take notice, and we might even have a chance at avoiding the dreadful launch state seen in some of the PC releases over the last few years.
