Date:
Monday , April 28, 2008
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Assassin's Creed Gameplay Performance and IQ

Assassin’s Creed is the first game to support DirectX 10.1! Is AMD's ATI Radeon HD 3870 series GPU now competitive? It seems that thanks to DX 10.1, yes. But is Ubisoft taking that advantage away from 3800 series card owners?

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Test Setup

For this evaluation we are using a Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 motherboard. We are using an Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800 processor running at 2.93 GHz, and 2GB of OCZ DDR2-800 memory with 4-4-4-12 timings. We are using the latest chipset drivers available and the latest BIOS at time of evaluation.

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+ = The WHQL qualified version NVIDIA ForceWare version 174.74 does not support the GeForce 8800 GT (or any other GeForce 8 series product) in Windows Vista x64. Therefore, for testing the GeForce 8800 GT, we used the ForceWare 174.74 beta version, which does support the GeForce 8800 GT. The only difference is one is WHQL the other is beta, but both contain the same game fixes.

For this comparison we are using default, out-of-box clock speeds on all video cards. We are using Windows Vista Ultimate x64 throughout with Service Pack 1 Installed. We will also do some specific testing with and without SP1 because there is something quite exciting to show you in this evaluation concerning SP1 and DX 10.1.

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. Please refer to this article for an explanation about our evaluation process. This page outlines our exact process for determining “Best Playable” which may quite a bit different than what we see many assume.