Assassin's Creed

Publisher: Ubisoft

Assassin's Creed was one of the biggest Xbox 360 launches of last year, and although it's PC launch was a little quieter, it's still undoubtedly one of the best looking and graphically ambitious games on release, with three medieval middle eastern cities to explore and slaughter your way through.

Assassin's Creed was also rather special upon its release, as it was the first game to feature DirectX 10.1 support, which gives shader units access to all Anti Aliasing buffers in a single pass – something that developers have been unable to do with DirectX 10.0. and which could significantly improve Anti Aliasing performance in games. At the time of writing, only ATI's graphics cards can currently take advantage of DirectX 10.1.

However, DirectX10.1 was silently patched out of the game following reported "stability issues", removing the potential advantage of using ATI hardware.

The removal of DirectX 10.1 support and the fact that Assassin's Creed was an Nvidia supported "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" game caused more than a few raised eyebrows and suspicious glances, with questions being asked of Nvidia's level of involvement in the decision to remove DirectX 10.1 - a feature that even its most recent hardware does not fully support yet.

For our Assassin's Creed testing though, we're only going to be using an un-patched, retail version of the game, meaning DirextX 10.1 will be very much enabled for the ATI cards that support it. We recorded the average and minimum frame rates while running a lap of the rooftops in Damascus with Altair, with all the game's graphical settings set to maximum. Rather than using the game's graphics menu to change graphic settings, we adjusted the Anti Aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering and resolution using the games Assassin.ini config file, as it allowed a greater deal of adjustability for in game graphic settings.







It looks like this is another game where there's not much work for the Radeon HD 4870 X2's 1,600 stream processors to do at resolutions below 2,560 x 1,600 - it's barely faster than a single Radeon HD 4870 which, incidentally, comes with the same clock speeds as AMD's new flagship card. However, when you start fiddling around with things at 2,560 x 1,600, you start to see a bit of scaling - and with 4xAA applied, you'll see a 30 percent performance improvement over the Radeon HD 4870.

Again, it's not particularly brilliant scaling, similar to what we witnessed in World in Conflict, but this time around the challenge from Nvidia's cards just isn't there - the Radeon HD 4870 is faster than a GeForce GTX 280 at the highest settings we tested, so the 4870 X2 has more than just a little bit of breathing space here.