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.







Due to the close proximity of the results in Assassin's Creed at lower resolutions, these tests very pretty tricky to run, and we retested some of the results several times to ensure they were accurate. Amazingly, the overclocked HD 4850 is able to surpass the HD 4870 in more than couple of tests, and comes very close indeed to its bigger brother in others, although at 1920 x 1200 with 4xAA and at 2560x1600 the HD 4870 gets to flex its muscles a little and clearly pulls ahead.