Skull & Bones review: Laptop and desktop benchmarks

While Skull & Bones was received somewhat decently by the press, the pirate adventure game is receiving mostly negative feedback from players. As it has since turned out, its chaotic development time of over 10 years meant that this plight was entirely foreseeable.

In our benchmark article, we will be primarily focusing on Skull & Bone's tech, which turned out much better. Although the game won't break any records for being visually stunning (lots of textures could be better, for example), its total look is fine—plus, its hardware requirements aren't all too extreme, as we will be analyzing in detail shortly. Furthermore, the game's tech seems to be quite mature (Ubisoft uses its in-house Anvil Engine). This means we didn't note a single crash or any other larger problems during the course of our test.

As is well-known from most Ubisoft games, Skull & Bones offers an extensive settings menu split into two parts—this is likely due to its sheer mass. Beginning with the Visuals tab, where you can change the picture mode, aspect ratio, resolution, VSync, field of view and the FPS limit. Even more settings can be found within the Graphics menu which houses over 10 options that can be adapted in one fell swoop using presets. From Very High onwards, global ray-tracing lighting is activated, but this doesn't come at the cost of too much performance. Less than ideal, on the other hand, is that automatic upscaling is automatically activated at every level. For our tests, we manually set the options to TAA Native (except for during the DLSS and FSR benchmarks).

In turn, we like that the numerous settings are visualized with the help of comparison images—in addition to text explanations. Ubisoft has also added a practical VRAM display to the options menu. According to this, around 8 GB is required for a mixture of 4K and Ultra settings, which is neither little nor particularly much. A positive: In contrast to Assassin's Creed Mirage, for example, changes are applied without having to restart the game. Meanwhile, the developers could still do with working on the duration of the games' loading times.

As is typical for Ubisoft, Skull & Bones features an integrated benchmark that shows a swish tracking shot for about 1.5 minutes and presents spectacular sea battles as well as land shots (see video).