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 a three whole medieval middle eastern cities to explore and slaughter your way through.

Assassin's Creed was also rather special upon it's release, as it was the first game to utilise 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 DirectX 10.1 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 set that even its most recent hardware does not fully support.

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 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 games 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.









While the advantages in anti aliasing performance afforded by DirectX 10.1 to the Radeon cards are still present, the overwhelming brute force of the overclocked GeForcce GTX 280 cards is still enough to overpower the Radeon HD 4870 in some anti aliasing tests. In comparison to the stock clocked GeForce GTX 280, they certainly offer a advantage, although it can sometimes be as little as just one frame per second. Disappointingly the Zotac GeForce GTX 260 AMP! produces painfully similar performance to it's stock clocked brother, indicating that it's something other than the core, shader and memory clocks in the card's architecture that is limiting performance,