Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in the technical test : Test |CUP | Specs |Config

tl;dr: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla shows itself in the technology test with good graphics quality. However, the benchmarks show that the new DirectX 12 renderer needs a fast graphics card for this. Apart from that, the PC version is exemplary.

With Valhalla, Ubisoft sends players of the well-known series to Norway and England to make the country unsafe as Vikings. Technically, with the latest part, you are only breaking new ground to a small extent and primarily relying on the tried and tested. The series-typical, in-house Anvil Next 2.0 engine is used again, which has apparently only made small progress compared to the expansion stage of the predecessor Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. And with that, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla still looks good, but can’t hold the very high level that Odyssey reached when it came out.

In the end, everything looks nicer in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, but only a little. The foresight is and remains impressive and, depending on the time of day, the lighting still conjures up beautiful images on the monitor. At the “wrong” time of day, however, the game does not go beyond “very nice”. It is also noticeable that some areas of the game world and also some animations and faces do not reach the level that can be expected nowadays in view of the new next-gen consoles. This is grumbling on a high level and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla also looks better in the overall package than Watch Dogs: Legion from the same house, but considering the Ubisoft resources it could have been a little more in the flagship game series.

Valhalla can do DirectX 12, DirectX 11 is left out

The renderer, however, is really new, because Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is using DirectX 12 for the first time, and exclusively. There is no DirectX 11 alternative. The PC version was developed in cooperation with AMD, but AMD’s own features such as FidelityFX apparently did not make it into the game. Ray tracing is also not supported.

The PC version is exemplary in many ways

Ubisoft has been putting a lot of effort into the PC versions of its own games lately and is taking it to a new high with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Yes, the title doesn’t run perfectly, as the benchmarks will show, but apart from that, the implementation is exemplary.

So the graphics menu opens almost every gun there is. It starts with numerous individual options and five different graphic presets. There is also an FPS limiter that can be configured between 30 and 90 FPS in 5 FPS steps. There is downsampling and upsampling in the game, with which the resolution can be scaled between 50 and 200 percent of the set resolution. An adaptive quality setting optionally lowers or reduces the resolution in order to achieve a desired FPS value of 30, 45 or 60 frames per second.

The graphics menu also has a VRAM display and there is a description including a sample screenshot for each individual option. However, this does not mean that the scope of the PC version has yet been reached. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla not only offers an integrated benchmark, but also the option of displaying extensive information on frame rate, frame times, GPU and CPU load and other details while playing via the F1 key.

Five graphic presets with reasonable tuning potential

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla offers five different graphic presets with “Low”, “Medium”, “High”, “Very High” and “Extremely High”. Every step shows visual differences, up to and including the setting “High” the game remains attractive. “Medium” and “Low”, on the other hand, should only be selected if there is no other option, because the LOD works very aggressively in both cases and repeatedly lets objects pop up just in front of the player. The increase in performance is decent in the high setting. What was previously unplayable will not go well then either. For this, the quality must be reduced accordingly.

The game comes up with good anti-aliasing that effectively smooths the image even in low resolutions such as Full HD. The image calm is rarely disturbed by flickering edges. However, the anti-aliasing in 1,920 × 1,080 produces a rather blurred image. From WQHD, the blurring decreases significantly.

On the next page: Benchmarks in Full HD, WQHD and UHD, frame times, game criticism and conclusion