Assassin's Creed Valhalla

The game is a twelfth main installment in Assassin's Creed series. It was developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft on November 10, 2020, with Playstation 5 version coming with the console launch two days later.

The game is using the latest iteration of AnvilNext 2.0 engine originally built for the 8th generation of gaming consoles.

Main new features of the new engine iteration are:


 * Exclusive and first for the series usage of DirectX 12 API on Windows.
 * Porting of the engine onto the 9th generation of gaming consoles.
 * Addition of per object motion blur.
 * Addition of snow deformation via geometry tessellation.

PC performance benchmarks
Game has a built-in performance benchmark which is representative of actual in-game performance.

The game was launched on PC in partnership with AMD.

Key performance takeaways

 * The game is relatively demanding but not excessively so for a high profile release at the end of 2020.
 * The game benefits greatly from Resizable BAR support (AMD Smart Access Memory).
 * The game runs considerably better on AMD GPUs even on systems without AMD Smart Access Memory support.
 * The game consume about 6GB of VRAM in 3840x2160 (4K) resolution.
 * Somewhat traditionally for games based on AnvilNext 2.0 engine the game's performance scales poorly with graphical settings.

Main console versions characteristics

 * The game is using dynamic resolution scaling with temporal reconstruction.
 * Graphical presets are the same on PS4 and XBO, PS4P and XBX, PS5 and XSX. XSS has lower than XSX shadows resolution.
 * Launch version of the game runs better on PS5 with XSX dipping into 50s more often and even hitting upper 40s in some scenes.
 * Both PS5 and XSX dip into 50s in cutscenes in the launch version.
 * Cutscenes have variable camera movement speed on Xbox Series consoles (and PC) which shows up as stuttering during cutscenes despite locked framerate.
 * Title Update 1.0.4 (released on November 26, 2020 ) has introduced Quality and Performance modes to PS5 and XS consoles.
 * This added 30 and 60 fps modes to PS5, XSS and XSX where they've had only one of the two previously.
 * This patch has also lowered the bottom limit of dynamic resolution range on XSX which removed severe dips from fps target in most of the scenes.