Assassin’s Creed Valhalla – What PC hardware is needed to match the PS5 visuals? • Eurogamer.net

With the arrival of the next generation of consoles, it is inevitable that the hardware requirements for PC software will increase as graphics quality and complexity increase. The baseline is reset with the arrival of the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, and we wanted to get a taste of what kind of PC graphics kit is required to match or even exceed console hardware. To do this, we have broken down the visual makeup of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, matching the PS5 and PC in terms of quality settings – getting a good grip on the optimized settings in the process, where we measure value for money. – price of each preset and suggest the most optimal settings for PC users.

First of all, it’s worth pointing out that we might well see very different results for very different games. In reviewing Watch Dogs Legion, I came to the conclusion that the Xbox Series X could be matched with a PC running an Nvidia RTX 2060 Super – mainly due to the high demands of ray tracing, an area in which GeForce hardware has come. a clear advantage. With Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, we see something very different. First off, the game doesn’t seem to perform as well on the Nvidia kit, and there’s no RT in use, negating a key advantage of GeForce. Meanwhile, AMD seems to be doing much better. According to our estimate, a Radeon RX 5700XT should be very close to the PS5 experience.

It should be noted that part of this comparison work is theoretical as there are no similar settings between consoles and PC. For example, the dynamic resolution scaling system is very different. The PS5 spends most of its time between 1440p and 1728p in our pixel count measurements, with many areas and cutscenes locked at 1440p. The PC is different – oddly perhaps, the anti-aliasing system is also the DRS system, with the adaptive tuning giving between 85% and 100% of the resolution on each axis, depending on the load. Simply put, the PC has a lower DRS window. So to get a feel for the relative performance between PC and consoles, I used an area of ​​the game that drops below 60 fps on PlayStation 5, and this, when rendering at 1440p resolution.

So what are the PC equivalent settings used on PlayStation 5? You can see my process in the video directly above, but it basically starts with the ultra high setting shadows, super high for world detail, and what could be ultra high, super high, or high for the expensive setting. Volumetric clouds from Assassin’s Creed (all look more or less the same when they can be directly compared). Meanwhile, perhaps unsurprisingly bearing in mind their stupendous memory allocations, the consoles use maximum quality textures, while the water setting is closest to that of the PC.

So far so good, but this is where things get a bit trickier. The mess option actually increases the density of the foliage, to the point where I found the PlayStation 5’s presentation actually exceeds the PC’s very high maximum, with even denser vegetation in my test scene. This is one of the very few settings on PC without an ultra high equivalent, so I guess this is a developer’s oversight. This setting has a very low impact on performance – with only a 4% difference between very high and low although they look separate, which we will cover later: the lack of scalability in the PC version of the Game.

There are also other inconsistencies. For one thing, all of the tissue physics in the game run at a sub-native frame rate on PlayStation 5: 30 fps or even less. On the highest PC settings you will get full native frame rate and you won’t get anything similar if you set the environment detail setting to medium. So basically we lack the granularity in the settings to get an exact match between console and PC in all areas. Additionally, there doesn’t seem to be an exact match in the rendering quality of the Fire which seems to work at full resolution on PC, but much lower on PS5. But that said, there are still some intriguing comparisons and conclusions we can draw.

Ultimately it’s clear that this is a very demanding game on PC, but what stood out to me the most was the lack of scalability – some settings like depth of field don’t seem like a thing. do, while the dynamic resolution scaling option is arbitrarily limited and lacking in utility. There are other annoyances as well: The quality of the tessellation cannot be increased, so even at the highest setting the terrain visibly deforms right in front of you, which happens on all platforms. The second conclusion is that the relatively low resolution on PlayStation 5 makes sense as it works with most PC settings to the max.

Choosing a particular stress point on PlayStation 5 – which drops below 60 fps and hits the minimum resolution of 1440p – I could run the PC version set at 1440p with settings as close as possible. And this is where we see the Nvidia vs AMD division in action. First off, RTX 2060 Super is 20% slower than the PlayStation 5, dropping to 10% with an RTX 2070 Super. Based on testing with a 2080 Ti, it appears that a 2080 Super or RTX 3060 Ti would be required to match or exceed the release of PlayStation 5. However, based on my testing with a Navi-based RX 5700, I would expect a 5700 XT to be within keystroke distance of the console flow. This assumes a very high clouds preset – performance improves if you drop to high.

Looking at the overall payoffs provided by my optimized settings, the game’s scalability is disappointing. Going from really high in all areas to my selected presets only saw performance increase by 14% on an RTX 2060 Super running at 1440p. Really, the most significant gain can be seen by enabling the adaptive resolution setting which increases performance from the optimized settings on ultra to around 28%. But again, the DRS solution is lacking – the resolution offset isn’t flexible enough to keep you at 60fps in many scenarios, limiting its effectiveness.

All in all, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla might not be the best way to compare consoles and PCs, especially given the disparity in performance between AMD and Nvidia GPUs, but it’s definitely a data point. interesting. This certainly points out that despite the relatively high prices, console users are getting a lot – when the PS5 and Xbox One launched in 2013, a £ 100 graphics card could match the console experience, for a while. at least. Seven years later, you’re on the hunt for the much more expensive PC parts needed to hit console parity – let alone exceed it.