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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Performance – Highest Playable

Assassin’s Creed Gameplay Setup

For our manual run-through, we chose a repeatable route through the city of Acre. Acre is the 3rd city visited by Altäir. The memory we chose was the assassination of Sibrand, so that we could have the entire city opened up to us. We found this to be one of the more graphically demanding areas in the game.

We began our test standing on the seal on the Assassin Bureau's roof. We immediately jumped down to street level, which we found to be more demanding than simply running across the rooftops. From there, we headed in a generally southwesterly direction, toward the "Rich District" and into Sibrand's castle. We were sure to stealthily assassinate a few guards during the trip, as we wanted to make sure the post-processing effects shown during the assassination sequences were in our test. Depending on how much trouble we get ourselves into in the process, the test takes between 6 and 8 minutes after we actually get into Acre.

Due to the slower, more deliberate pace of combat in this game, we found that the lowest playable framerate was 25 frames per second. As such our redline threshold has been set at 25 fps on all of our graphs.

Assassin’s Creed Image Quality Setup

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As is typical for a game ported from a console, there are relatively few graphics options in Assassin's Creed. In fact, there are only four options with which we are concerned. The first is the "Multisampling" option, which simply determines what level of MSAA is used during the rasterization process. The Multisampling option has 3 notches, numbered 1 through 3. At notch 1, MSAA is disabled entirely; at notch 2, 2X MSAA is used; and at notch 3, 4X MSAA is used.

NOTE: At resolutions of 1600x1200 and above, the Multisampling option is automatically set to 1, and the setting is disabled and cannot be changed within the game. However, editing the Assassin.ini file located in the user's windows profile ("C\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Ubisoft\Assassin's Creed" for Windows Vista, and "C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Ubisoft\Assassin's Creed" for Windows XP) the setting can be changed, and the game does, in fact, honor the manually adjusted setting. Users should look for the setting reading: Multisampling=0, and adjust the number. Set it to "0" to disable AA, "1" for 2X MSAA, and "2" for 4X MSAA.

Next, the "Graphic Quality" slider controls the effects used, shadow map resolution, and anisotropic texture filtering (AF). At level 4, AF is enabled, and at level 3, AF is disabled entirely. We found that attempting to force AF or AA from the graphics card control panel can result in severely decreased performance and can even result in graphical glitches and artifacts. There is another INI file setting for AF ("Anisotropic=1"), but increasing the setting beyond "1" (enabled) has no impact on visual quality.

The "Level of Detail" setting controls the complexity of meshes and textures for the world, world objects and NPCs, but not Altäir himself.

The "Post FX" setting is an On/Off setting, and enables or disables post processing effects such as motion blur, depth of field, and HDR lighting. Assassin's Creed makes very effective use of those effects, and we would honestly rather sacrifice other features than turn "Post FX" off.

For more details on what the graphics options do, please see Koroush Ghazi's excellent Tweak Guide.

For all testing below Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista Ultimate x64 is installed.

Highest Playable Settings

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IMPORTANT NOTE: The in-game "Graphic Quality" setting does not successfully enable AF on the AMD's ATI Radeon HD 3870 series of video cards. The only way to enable AF on these video cards, therefore, is to force it from the control panel. However, forcing AF caused our performance to plummet during testing, forcing us to lower the resolution and in-game settings that we otherwise found playable. In the end, we decided that high resolution, shadows, and high quality meshes were more important than texture filtering. We attempted every means available to us to address the issue, but it appears to be just plain broken. Let's hope that Ubisoft sees fit to fix this problem in a future patch. Under normal circumstances, AF doesn't tend to present much of a challenge or incur very much performance cost on modern video cards, so we don't believe that this problem will significantly impact performance.

For every video card we tested here, we found the maximum in-game settings to be usable, requiring only that we change the resolution and AA level to maintain playability. Had we been forced to go below 1600x1200 with any video card, we may have considered lowering an in-game setting or two. Luckily, that did not need to happen. Remember that using maximum in-game settings automatically enables AF, though the level of AF it enables is not certain.

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NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2

The GeForce 9800 GX2 gave the strongest showing, but that is to be expected. It is currently NVIDIA's flagship video card, coming in at well over $500 USD. It was able to run Assassin's Creed at 2560x1600 without AA, and with AF enabled by the game. Looking solely at the numbers on the table above, it may look like it has some performance space to enable at least 2X MSAA, but this is unfortunately not the case. At 2560x1600, the game is pushing data for more than 4 million pixels to the framebuffer for every frame. Multisampling that amount of data, especially in a game like this with an abundance of high detail meshes, is extremely demanding.

Looking at the performance profile of the GeForce 9800 GX2 in the graph above you can see that, while it has very high performance peaks, it also dips down below 40 frames per second frequently. The good news, though, is that jagged edges are less noticeable at this very high resolution, so we are not unduly bothered by it. But for those with displays smaller than 30", the GeForce 9800 GX2 can easily deliver smooth gameplay in Assassin's Creed at 1920x1200 (and lower) with 4X MSAA.

NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX

For the GeForce 9800 GTX, 2560x1600 proved to be just out of its reach. At that very high resolution, we simply could not maintain playable framerates without sacrificing an in-game setting, and thereby changing the experience for the worse. Therefore, we opted to lower the resolution to 1920x1200, which seemed to free up considerable GPU time. With that extra performance, we enabled 4X MSAA and found it to be quite playable. The aliasing that was made more visible by running at the lower resolution was almost eliminated by the multisampling setting.

ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 made a fine showing in Assassin's Creed. We found 1600x1200 with 4X MSAA to be quite playable. For gamers with 24" or larger displays, you could increase that resolution to 1920x1200 and reduce the Multisampling setting to 2X MSAA (or "1" in the INI file), and the game should still be playable. And players with 20" or 22" widescreen LCD monitors should have no trouble running at 1680x1050 with 4X MSAA.

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NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT

The GeForce 8800 GT continues to prove its great value. As one of the three least expensive video cards here, it let us play at a high widescreen resolution, though without AA of any kind. We could lower the resolution to 1600x1200 or 1680x1050 and enable 2X MSAA, but we generally prefer higher resolution if we can get it. At 1920x1200, the GeForce 8800 GT had no problems delivering a solid experience.

NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT

Ever-so-slightly slower than the GeForce 8800 GT, the GeForce 9600 GT came in at 1600x1200, with no AA. At 1920x1200, gameplay was too jerky and combat was not fluid, so we had to lower it back down to 1600x1200. However, at that resolution, the game was quite smooth. Widescreen gamers can change that resolution to 1680x1050 and expect very similar performance.

ATI Radeon HD 3870

The Radeon HD 3870 surprised us in Assassin's Creed. In our previous evaluations of this video card, it came out to be slightly slower in general than the NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT. Here, however, it seemed to take the lead. It ran optimally at 1600x1200 and 1680x1050, but it also allowed us to enable 2X MSAA, which the GeForce 9600 GT could not handle easily at this resolution. The reason for this could possibly be the inclusion of DirectX 10.1 in Assassin's Creed with its multisampling optimizations. We will have more on that later in this evaluation.