Assassin's Creed Shadows: PC Raytracing Modes Explained

[Blk_Widow9]

Hello everyone,

Following the release of our PC specs for Assassin's Creed Shadows, we wanted to share additional insight directly from our tech team on the use of raytracing in the game.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows features three distinct raytracing modes on PC:

Selective Raytracing: This mode uses raytracing only within the Hideout portion of the game. The reason behind this, is that the Hideout allows extensive player customization at a level never seen before on Assassin’s Creed. Because of that, we cannot use traditional, pre-calculated, global illumination techniques, and therefore need to adopt a real-time approach with raytracing. In all other gameplay situations, such as in the open world, raytracing will not be used.

However, if your GPU does not support hardware raytracing, such as pre-RTX GPUs, we have developed our own solution to allow competent, yet older, GPUs to run Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The game will use a proprietary software-based raytracing approach developed specifically for that. This was made to ensure Assassin's Creed Shadows remains accessible to as many players as possible.

Standard Raytracing: This mode uses the hardware raytracing capabilities of the GPU to compute real-time global illumination.

Extended Raytracing: This mode uses the hardware raytracing capabilities of the GPU to compute both real-time global illumination and reflections. This is the most extensive usage of raytracing.

On GPUs that support hardware raytracing, the choice will always be given to the player. It is one of numerous settings available to players to customize their experience on PC.

[🍃🪻🪷Sylvie🩵🍸🍵]

Great. I'll buy RTX 5090 to enjoy raytracing.

[Tonykov]

Thanks for the explanation, I will go with Extended Raytracing (4090 user).

Question: is raytracing for AC Shadows so advanced as the raytracing seen in SW Outlaws? Because I'm playing Outlaws and the raytracing there feels like path tracing, but seeing the gameplay videos of AC Shadows it doesn't feel so advanced, it feels more like Avatar ray tracing approach.

[Alin.]

I see RT as a complete waste of performance, as good as it looks, it should always be optional. My PC can use RT but I do not care more about graphics than I do about performance.

[rekt0ro]

Автор сообщения: Alin.

I see RT as a complete waste of performance, as good as it looks, it should always be optional. My PC can use RT but I do not care more about graphics than I do about performance.

+

[Mike]

I hope as a 3080 owner I can opt OUT of RT, as for me the visual enhancements are never worth the performance drops nor do I care for things like reflections and things like that. I will wait for benchmarks as I;m tired of buy full priced games and not able to get playable frame rates

[Cypher]

Ray tracing is the most immersive, realistic and gorgeous form of lighting solution which is unique in the sense that it saves developers a lot of time in development. That is once they adopt a RT-only implementation.

That said, as a 4090 owner, I am going with Extended.

[Xedius]

Автор сообщения: Mike

I hope as a 3080 owner I can opt OUT of RT, as for me the visual enhancements are never worth the performance drops nor do I care for things like reflections and things like that. I will wait for benchmarks as I;m tired of buy full priced games and not able to get playable frame rates

You can't opt out because it will still use some sort of RT for lighting. It isn't baked lighting like Valhalla.
In my opinion given the studio's financial problems they should've stayed with baked lighting and also release the game on PS4/ONE (175 million consoles). Valhalla looked good enough and the problems were related to the content/gameplay and not with the graphics.

[mostly5]

Thank god, I was worried I would have to buy the game on console and buy it on PC at a later date because Raytracing games run pretty poorly for me even though I am using an RTX 4050

[HortY]

I hope my RTX 4070 gpu and Ryzen 7 7800X3D cpu running the game 1440p high and rtx high settings... I would be grateful if it was at least 80 fps.

[TombRaiser]

I’m hoping my Ryzen 5 2600X turbo-clocked at 4.2 GHz will be enough. The Ryzen 5 3600 has exactly the same specs. I just barely meet the GPU requirements.

[Lord Winter]

Please remove the 30 FPS cap in cutscenes ... it is not even properly frame-paced even if put the screen at 30hz.

What were you thinking?

[Centuryt]

RTX 5090 720p upscaled to 1080p 75fps

[Medusa]

Something is odd with DLSS and it's custom resolution slider.
I can set the resscale to 20 % at 4k and the game still looks good, and that doesn't make sense. The resscale is not doing what it says it does or it is bugged.

[Stardog]

Why does it run so bad and looks worse than Odyssey? Place some more probes...

[Sic Semper Tyrannis]

Why is it in Nighttime so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dark?
And in Daytime the Sun is shining like in the real World?