Assassin's Creed Shadows Optimized Settings

Assassin's Creed Shadows is the best looking game in the franchise, and you'll be glad to know that it actually runs quite well. Ubisoft's Anvil engine truly shines here.

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We've been tinkering with all available options on our system to try to reach an ideal mix of settings, which isn't so hard to do. The menus are clear and concise, and give you a ton of choices to tweak the game to your experience. Here are our recommendations.

Video Settings

Run the game on your native resolution and choose the best upscaling for your hardware. DLSS for Nvidia, FSR for AMD, and XESS for Intel. There is no reason to use TAA upscaling.

If you want to ensure rock solid 60 fps and have a weaker PC, tinker with the Dynamic Resolution options. AC Shadows even allows you to set a maximum and minimum dynamic resolution, which is a percentage of your native res.

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In one of the first examples we've witnessed, this game does not tie frame generation with upscaling technology. That means that if you're running a 30series card, like we are, you can use DLSS upscaling paired with FSR frame gen. The best of both worlds.

Assassin's Creed Shadows Requirements

Motion Blur and Chromatic Aberration can be toggled on or off, with little to no performance impact. Subjective choice here, but we kept them both on.

Assassin's Creed Shadows features Raytraced Global Illumination, which is the most impactful graphical setting in the game. There are three available choices:

• Diffuse Hideout Only - As close to off as possible, RTGI is only on when you're inside your Hideout, which is an enclosed area "outside" of the open world.
• Diffuse Everywhere - The most noticeable setting, will considerably upgrade how lighting looks.
• Diffuse + Specular Everywhere - Adds subtle but noticeable reflections on top of the GI.

If you're okay with running frame gen, you can safely run Diffuse Everywhere even on lower end GPUs from 30series/6000amd. If you don't want to run frame gen, Hideout Only will turn off raytracing, but with a very noticeable visual impact on the game. We highly recommend Diffuse Everywhere.

When it comes to raytracing quality, we would recommend leaving it on High, as there is a big difference between Medium and High, and the performance impact isn't too bad.

Tested on an RTX 3080 + 7800X3D

If you're running a 8GB GPU, leave Texture Streaming Pool on Medium. For GPUs at 12GB bump it to High, and for anything above that crank it to Very High or Ultra.

Geometry is heavily CPU based, so what you choose here will depend on how good your CPU is. We recommend leaving everything on High if you can run it, as pop-in can be noticeable on lower settings.

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The other setting you should tweak to finalize is Hair Strands. Although it looks quite nice, we would recommend keeping it on only for your characters. This is a demanding setting and the normal hair quality still looks good.

Bonus Recommendation

We highly recommend Immersive Mode under the Audio settings. Assassin's Creed Shadows is an impressively immersive experience, and having characters speaking their actual language helps a ton in that area.

Immersive Mode gives you exclusively Japanese and Portuguese voice acting, which is excellently performed.

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