Assassin's Creed Origins Notebook and Desktop Benchmarks

For the original German review, see here.

Like its predecessors Unity and Syndicate, the latest installment in the successful Assassin’s Creed series is based on Ubisoft’s in-house engine AnvilNext 2.0, which is also used by other Ubisoft titles (e.g. Rainbow Six Siege, For Honor & Ghost Recon Wildlands). These titles have done well in our technology tests in the past; that is to say, the quality of the graphics on offer was in line with the system requirements.

Assassin’s Creed Origins somewhat bucks this trend. Although demands on the GPU have hardly increased in comparison to Ghost Recon Wildlands, the demands on the processor are significantly higher without a corresponding increase in the visual display.

One sign of the game’s surprising CPU hunger is the fact that stronger GPUs only find limited performance gains when the display resolution is reduced. On the other hand, systems with identical GPUs but varying CPUs measure vastly different frame rates. There is - depending on the settings used - a difference of greater than 30 FPS (103 vs. 67 FPS @ 1280x720 & Very Low) between a desktop computer with a Core i7-6700K and a GeForce GTX 1060, and a laptop with a Core i7-6820HK and a GeForce GTX 1060, which works out to be a disparity of over 50%.

Although Origins shows good signs of “multithreading” upon inspection of the CPU under load, which in itself is a positive characteristic and speaks in favor of modernized task sharing, the fact that dual-core chips with Hyper-Threading, or quad-core chips without Hyper-Threading tend to be overstrained, and indeed, the fact that even quad core chips with eight threads working in parallel are pushed to their limits, would appear to point to rather poor optimization. As we’ve recently reported, the high CPU usage could be related to the copy protection software Denuvo, which has already been the frequent cause of negative headlines in the past.

Were we to forget for a moment the limitations of the game caused by the processor, Ubisoft delivers a thoroughly decent technical experience, which - other Assassin’s Creed titles send their regards - scores points with its lush long-range views, high quality details and harmonious lighting effects.

The Egyptian setting is very new and refreshing, which is why Origins appears to be more than just another soulless installment in the Assassin’s Creed series. It’s only in the sharpness of the textures where room for improvement could be found.

We praise the developers above all for the first-class graphics menu that is not only very clean to navigate but is also extensive. Because of the practical comparison images and explanatory texts, we will even speak about the current options, of which other companies should make note. We’ll start with the display menu, which includes brightness controls, display mode, aspect ratio, resolution, refresh rate and field of view. There is also the option to change the internally rendered resolution, as well as turn V-Sync and FPS limits on or off.

The graphics menu is especially comprehensive. Here you can find various buttons and sliders for controlling levels of detail (shadows, environment, textures, background, fog, water, characters, etc.) as well as other technical features. Along with tessellations, Origins has options for screen space reflections, ambient occlusion and volumetric clouds. The type of anti-aliasing is unfortunately undefined. We’re assuming it’s a type of post processing like TAA.

Those wanting to change the graphics settings in one click can simply use one of the preset options. There are six presets in total, four of which - Very Low, Medium, High and Ultra High - we have tested. In contrast to the wide range of graphics options available, it is somewhat of a shame that so many of them require a restart of the game. This is not too annoying in light of the skippable intro scenes, although starting the game anew takes a while even with an SSD. “Takes a while” also describes installing the game. The retail version comes with five discs, and the digital download size is roughly 37 GB (about 41 GB on the hard drive).

In contrast to other triple-A games from 2016 and 2017, Origins is by the by relatively efficient when it comes to video memory. While some titles (such as Middle-Earth: Shadow of War) already require more than 4 GB of graphics memory at maximum details at 1920x1080, the newest Assassin’s Creed title seems to be content with approximately 2.7 GB. The current usage at any stage can easily be read off the VRAM display.

A game with so many graphics options also has in turn so many ways to analyze and measure performance using the integrated benchmarking tools. With the exception of Watch Dogs 2, this feature is shared by all of Ubisoft’s recent triple-A games (Ghost Recon Wildlands, For Honor, The Division, Far Cry Primal, Rainbow Six Siege), although none of their benchmarks are quite as detailed as in Origins.

In addition to showing the most important hardware information (CPU, GPU, API, drivers), the utilization, or rather the temperature of the processor and the graphics card can also be displayed with a push of the F1 key. There is, of course, also an FPS indicator.