Assassin's Creed (2008): PC Performance Benchmarks for Graphics Cards and Processors

BASIC INFORMATION ON THE GAME

 

Year : 2008
Developer : Ubisoft Montreal
Publisher : Ubisoft Entertainment
Genre : Action / 3D / 3rd Person

Year 1191. From the blessed struggle for the liberation of the Holy Sepulcher, the Third Crusade turned into a personal feud between the leaders of the Christian and Muslim worlds. After taking the port of Acre, Richard the Lionheart prepares to inflict a final defeat on Saladin in the promised Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the Holy Land is being devastated by numerous governors who have felt their power, having lost administrative control.

A series of pinpoint strikes can stop the bloody arbitrariness: if everyone who benefits from war is eliminated, then peace will come, and the goal of the Assassin sect will be fulfilled. Impossible mission, suicide mission - Altair gladly takes on a dangerous job, because this is the only chance to regain his lost position in the hierarchy of the brotherhood and wash away the shame of recent failure. In addition to selflessness, the protagonist has the skills of a professional killer: possession of various types of edged weapons to win martial arts, possession of his own body for covert movement in the urban landscape, possession of intuition to choose the right victim and the right moment.

THE GRAFICAL PART

In this subsection of our review, the main graphical aspects of this game are revealed. Particular attention is paid to the version of the graphics engine used, the version of the API used, graphics settings and the quality of the development of the main visual aspects.

Supported OS and graphics API

Assassin's Creed is supported on major Windows operating systems, including Windows XP/Vista. Windows 7 and Windows 8. Other operating systems are currently not supported by developers.

 

The priority and primary graphics API for Saints Assassin's Creed is  DirectX 10 . 

Game engine

Assassin's Creed is based on the Anvil engine. Anvil engine is a game engine created by Ubisoft Montreal, a subsidiary of publisher Ubisoft. "Anvil" is a commercial proprietary cross-platform game engine designed for use on the personal computer (Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X) and on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS and Wii game consoles. First used in Assassin's Creed.

The first game to use the Anvil engine was the third-person action game Assassin's Creed, developed by Ubisoft Montreal and released in 2007 for game consoles and in 2008 for PC. In this game, the engine was called "Scimitar".

The engine uses HumanIK subroutine components developed by Autodesk. HumanIK is used to correctly position the animation of the character's arms and legs during real-time pushes and climbs. As a physical subsystem, the engine uses the well-known Havok physics engine, which, in addition to simulating rigid body mechanics, also simulates tissue physics

 

Advanced game settings

 

Assassin's Creed has a rather meager arsenal of graphics settings, but it's enough to change the graphics settings in a wide range of performance on different systems.

 

Below we have provided screenshots of the game at various graphics settings, where our readers can see the difference between the minimum, medium and maximum graphics quality settings. 

Various quality modes

As we can see, the picture quality between the different settings is just colossal.

Comparison of FullHD and 4K

In 4K, Assassin's Creed looks just fine.

Comparison of anti-aliasing modes

When anti-aliasing is activated, the picture improves noticeably, but surface irregularities are not completely eliminated. Below is our video review of Assassin's Creed at various quality settings:

General visual design and game physics

Assassin's Creed was a breakthrough in its time, both in terms of gameplay and graphics. The game received an unsurpassed storyline, an innovative setting, and of course a good graphics component, backed up by the capabilities of DirectX 10. Of course, the game had some problems, but in terms of optimization, it allowed you to play on almost any gaming PC of that time without any problems.

 

    

Next, we will go directly to the gaming tests and determine what impact this game has on modern computer hardware. 

TEST PART

GPU test

All video cards were tested at maximum graphics quality by MSI Afterburner. The purpose of the test is to determine how video cards from different manufacturers behave under the same conditions. The average and minimum FPS were taken as the performance indicator. Below is a video of the test segment:    

Our video cards were tested at resolutions of 2560x1600 and 3840x2160 at the maximum graphics quality settings allowed by Assassin's Creed. SLI works without problems, but AMD CrossFireX has some glitches, such as frame lock in the test scene at about 110 FPS. 

Testing at 2560x1600 resolution

      

Testing at maximum quality settings 2560x1600

 

With these settings,  video cards of the Radeon R7 260X or GeForce GTX 750 Ti level showed an acceptable FPS.

Testing at 3840x2160 resolution

     

Testing at maximum quality settings 3840x2560

 

With these settings,  video cards of the Radeon R7 260X or GeForce GTX 750 Ti level showed an acceptable FPS.

Testing of the video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the  MSI Afterburner program. The results on top video cards from AMD and NVIDIA were taken as an indicator at resolutions of  1920x1080 and 2560x1600 with various anti-aliasing settings.

Testing at maximum memory GPU quality settings

 

The recommended amount of video memory usage for a resolution of 1920x1080 will be 768 MB of video memory, for a resolution of 2560x1600 - 1024 MB of video memory and for a resolution of 3840x2160 about 1536 MB of video memory. 

CPU test

  

We tested processor dependence on 16 models of basic configurations that are relevant today. The test was carried out in those places where the value of the video card for the game is minimal and its load was less than 99%, this time at a resolution of 1920x1080 with maximum graphics quality settings. Below is a video of the test segment:    

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080

 

CPU performance in the game is quite sufficient for all test models. But an old fact, when a character is located in our test segment above ground level, FPS drops many times and is equal to almost the same level for all CPU models.

Loading of processor cores at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 Intel % 

 

Loading of processor cores  at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 AMD % 

 

The game is capable of supporting up to 6 computational threads, which is quite good for 2008.

RAM test

The test was carried out on the base configuration Core i 7 5960X @ 4.6 GHz with 16GB DDR4 2400 MGz pre-installed memory. All used RAM was taken as an indicator. The RAM test on the entire system was carried out on various test benches without running extraneous applications (browsers, etc.).

Testing the game's RAM consumption at various quality settings 

 

As we can see, with various quality settings, the amount of RAM consumed in Assassin's Creed is at the level of 600 megabytes.

Testing system RAM consumption  

 

With a 6 GB system, Assassin's Creed consumes about 2 GB of RAM. In the presence of a system with 8 gigabytes, the RAM consumption of all RAM was 2 gigabytes. With a 16 GB system, total memory consumption was almost 2.5 GB. And with 32 gigabytes of RAM, the system consumes 3.4  gigabytes of RAM.