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.







Assassin's Creed continues to be one of the more interesting benchmarks we put graphics cards though, as it's the only one to support DirectX 10.1 and its improved anti-aliasing efficiency. However, at low resolutions the proximity of our results indicates that the benchmarking system is becoming CPU rather than GPU limited. At higher resolutions the graphics cards on test are better able to stretch their legs, but even then the 4870 X2 is only able to stretch a lead of a couple of frames per second over the GeForce GTX 280, and even loses out to team green at 1,920 x 1,200 with 0xAA.