If there’s been one constant with the Assassin’s Creed games over the last few years, it’s that they have run like shit on PC.
Assassin’s Creed 3 didn’t do that great, Assassin’s Creed 4 was very poorly optimised (and had some very bizarre troubleshooting) and the less we say about Assassin’s Creed Unity’s disastrous port the better.
So with Assassin’s Creed Syndicate coming to PC a month late last week, folks would have been well within their rights to expect the worst.
Maybe it was the extra month’s delay, maybe it was changes under the hood of the game itself (gone are the massive crowds and weird lighting tech from Unity), but those folks are in for a pleasant surprise: relative to the dumpster fires of the last few games in the series (Liberty and Rogue’s “last gen” ports excepted), this is just fine.
It’s not perfect. System requirements are pretty damn high for what’s on show, meaning most people won’t be playing this game on its highest settings (including a very thirsty max shadows setting) until they buy a PC from the future. And old-fashioned Assassin’s Creed weirdness like falling through the world and janky NPC behaviour is as present as ever. But it’s nothing like the madness we suffered through at Unity’s launch.
I’ve recorded some gameplay footage on my personal PC, taking the game through its paces on a variety of graphics settings. I’ve got an i5-4690, a NVIDIA GTX 980, 16GB of RAM and the installation is running off a Samsung SSD 840 EVO.
The settings I’ve opted to play the game with — balancing performance with prettiness — generally net me around 45 FPS. The vid will show me changing settings to get performance everywhere from 20 FPS right through to 60 FPS. Note that in keeping with funky system settings quirks, the FPS gain made by dropping a bunch of things like AA and texture quality isn’t worth the downgrade.
Here are the settings used at the start of the video:
Comments
10 responses to “Assassin’s Creed Syndicate Runs Pretty Well On PC”
My getting long in the tooth 680 had to lower this down to medium ish to get it running ok at 1440p. Really time to upgrade.
Sad that games running well on PC is now such an exception that it becomes news
I couldn’t agree with you more. PC is the platform that gaming began with. Yet developers neglect PC gamers for those pathetic console peasants.
What about Pong?
Pong was clearly a graphical downgrade because of [Whatever Console Existed at the Time]. If it weren’t for that, Pong would probably have been released as on par graphically and gameplay wise with Battlefield 1942
I think I’ll be moving to PC for my next AC. The current console generation just couldn’t really run it anymore. Not gamebreaking on PS4 but the game would be much better played at 60fps with better graphics.
I think this game on the PS4 looks amazing! Yes 60fps would be nice but not a deal breaker, but the attention to detail in the world is amazing.
Yeap. I’m sure the PC release this time looks even more stunning too. I think the next AC should be more demanding and my PC is more than capable anyway. I just decided to stick with console since I played the entire AC series on PS3 and PS4
I’m playing it with an r9 290x and I’ve had incredible fluctuation on frame rate. It just refuses to stay consistent. It’ll be running on ultra at 45fps and then drop down to 18 for no apparent reason. I’ve ended up turning it down to high and adjusted a bunch of settings so that at least now it only fluctuates between 40-60fps.
Getting 45 FPS with drops to 20 on THAT configuration it’s not “pretty well” 🙂 You should render, at least, 60 FPS (constantly) mate 🙂