Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: what PC hardware is needed to match the PS5 images? • Eurogamer.net

With the advent of the next generation of consoles, it is inevitable that the hardware requirements for PC software will increase as the quality and complexity of graphics increases. The baseline is reset with the arrival of Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, and we wanted to get an outline of what kind of PC graphics kit is required to match or even exceed console hardware. To do this, we broke down the visual composition of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, matching PS5 and PC in terms of quality settings, getting a good handle on optimized settings in the process, where we measure the cost effectiveness of each preset and Suggest the most settings. optimal for PC users.

First of all, it’s worth noting that we may see very different results for very different games. In evaluating Watch Dogs Legion, I came to the conclusion that Xbox Series X could be paired with a PC running an Nvidia RTX 2060 Super, primarily due to the onerous demands of ray tracing, an area where GeForce hardware has a distinct advantage. With Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, we see something very different. First of all, the game doesn’t seem to perform as well on the Nvidia kit, and there’s no RT in use, negating a key GeForce advantage. Meanwhile, AMD appears to be performing significantly better. By our calculations, a Radeon RX 5700XT should come very close to the PS5 experience.

It’s worth noting that some of this comparison work is theoretical, as there are no similar setups between consoles and PCs. For example, the dynamic resolution scaling system is very different. 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; Interestingly perhaps, the anti-aliasing system is also the DRS system, with the adaptive configuration providing between 85% and 100% resolution on each axis, depending on the load. Simply put, the PC has a lower DRS window. So to get an idea of ​​the relative performance between PC and consoles, I used an area of ​​the game that falls below 60fps on PlayStation 5, and it does so while rendering at 1440p resolution.

So what are the equivalent PC settings used on PlayStation 5? You can see my process in the video directly above, but it essentially starts with the shadows of ultra-high settings, very high for world details, and what could be ultra-high, very high, or high for Assassin’s expensive volumetric cloud settings. Believe (they all look more or less identical where they can be directly compared). Meanwhile, perhaps unsurprisingly, considering their prodigious memory allocations, the consoles use top-quality textures, while the water settings are closest to the PC’s high.

So far so good, but this is where things get a bit more complicated. The clutter option actually increases foliage density, to the point where I found that the PlayStation 5 presentation actually exceeds the very high PC maximum, with even denser vegetation in my test scene. This is one of the few settings on PC without an ultra-high equivalent, so I guess that’s a developer oversight. This setting has a very low impact on performance, with only a four percent difference between very high and low, although they seem like separate worlds, which is something we will address later: the lack of scalability in the PC version of the game.

There are also other inconsistencies. For one thing, all of the fabric physics in the game runs at sub-native frame rate on PlayStation 5: 30fps or even less. At the highest PC settings, you’ll get a full native frame rate, and you’ll only get something similar if you adjust the Ambient Details setting to medium. So, essentially, we lack the granularity in setup to get an exact console-to-PC mix across the board. Also, there doesn’t seem to be an exact match in the quality of the Fire rendering, which appears to run at full resolution on PC, but much lower on PS5. But with that said, there are still some intriguing comparisons and conclusions we can draw.

In the end, it’s clear that this is a very demanding PC game, but what struck me the most was the lack of scalability – some settings like depth of field don’t seem to do anything, while the dynamic resolution scaling option it is arbitrarily limited and useless. There are some other annoyances as well: the tessellation quality cannot be scaled up, so even at the highest settings the terrain visibly warps right in front of you – something that happens on all platforms. The second conclusion is that the relatively low resolution of the PlayStation 5 makes sense, as it works with most PC configurations to the fullest.

By choosing a particular stress point on the PlayStation 5, which drops below 60fps and hits the minimum resolution of 1440p, you could run the PC version set at 1440p with settings as close to equivalent as possible. And this is where we see the Nvidia vs AMD split in action. First off, RTX 2060 Super is 20% slower than 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 needed to match or exceed the output of the PlayStation 5. However, based on my testing with a Navi-based RX 5700, I would expect a 5700 XT to come close to console performance. This assumes a very high cloud preset; performance improves if low to high.

Looking at the overall gains delivered by my optimized setup, the scalability of the game is disappointing. Going from ultra high across the board to my select presets only saw a performance increase of 14 percent on an RTX 2060 Super running at 1440p. Actually the highest gain can be seen by activating the adaptive resolution setting which increases the performance of the optimized over ultra setting to around 28 percent. But once again, the DRS solution is missing: the resolution change is not flexible enough to keep it at 60fps in many scenarios, limiting its effectiveness.

All in all, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla may not be the best way to compare consoles and PCs, especially considering the disparity in performance between AMD and Nvidia GPUs, but it’s certainly an interesting tidbit. It certainly emphasizes that despite the relatively high prices, console users are getting a great deal: when the PS5 and Xbox One were released in 2013, a £ 100 graphics card could match the console experience, at least by a weather. Seven years later, you’re looking for the much more expensive PC parts needed to reach console parity, let alone exceed it.