Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut Edition
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ESRB:
Blood,Strong Language,Violence
Publisher: UbiSoft Genre(s): Action / Adventure Home Page: http://assassinscreed.uk.ubi.com/
DX10!Assassin's Creed is definitely no quick hack port. Both DX9 and DX10 executables are available, and this time there is some definite differences. While the visual quality differs only slightly, mostly due to differences in lighting, what makes the DX10 build better is how texture caching is handled.
With DX9, there is notable stuttering when you enter a new area and do a quick look around you - the performance takes a notable hit as textures are cached to the local RAM of the card. Using DX10 the performance is constant from the word "go". DX10 version also allows you to play in windowed mode, and with DX10 on a system with enough RAM, ALT-TAB in and out of the game is almost instant. The actual performance DX9 vs DX10 is virtually identical on Vista - you lose maybe 3-4fps using the DX10 version. Also the CPU load seems to be notably lower with the DX10 version, so if your system has more GPU power than CPU power, it might turn out to be faster in some special cases. Granted, you still get notably faster performance using DX9 on the XP, but even there the difference is not huge - maybe 10-15%, and most likely due to the general extra overhead added by Vista. In any case, the DX10 version is very playable and provides some minor advantages over DX9 without bogging the game down with additional unnecessary rendering trickery. Oooh, Shiny! Proper multithreading - with actual benefit from a quad core. Visually the PC port is exceptionally good. If your system can take it, at high resolutions the game looks notably better than on the consoles, and it runs very smoothly. On a high end quad core system with GeForce 9800GTX 512MB, the framerate hovers around 60fps with all settings maximized, offering considerably smoother gameplay than on the XBox 360. The engine also scales fairly well. While the both the minimum and recommended specs call for a recent gaming system, they are set to ensure that the game looks and plays great on such a system, even at the manufacturer's minimum specification level. There are further options to degrade the game visually for lesser systems, and you can actually play the game on a system that is well below the manufacturer's minimum requirements. It's actually a small miracle how well the game runs on a crappy PC, assuming you don't mind the visual quality loss or the somewhat choppy frame rate. In practical testing, a down-clocked single core Athlon 64 FX-55 at 2.2Ghz paired with a GeForce 7600GT 256MB managed to run the game at 1280x1024 in Windows XP while staying barely playable with the two main graphical settings at "2" and shadows at "1". Only major hitch encountered was with the ATI Radeon HD3870X2. The performance constantly degraded when the card was used in the "two chip" mode (Catalyst A.I. enabled), and the only way to maintain playable frame rate was to force the card run in single chip mode. This is obviously a driver issue, as the game runs fine on Radeon HD3870 and Radeon HD2600 at the expected performance level.
The YouGamers minimum has been set fairly high to ensure that the game stays smooth and visually appealing - you can go below it, if you are happy to lose the shadows and all the detailing and just want to play the game. While there has been some noise around the web about crashes and other problems, in our testing the game (retail copy, not from Steam) ran flawlessly on all three test systems. No crashes or odd performance issues, if you disregard the obvious driver issue with the Radeon HD3870X2. Considering how hard the game pushes video cards, I personally suspect that most of the problems are due to hardware issues or truly arcane incompatibilities. If your system is fairly modern and has good cooling and solid power supply to keep things running, the game will most likely run flawlessly on your system as well. I'm not sure if the disc and/or Steam copy of the game in the US uses different copy protection system, but the European copy we used had no problems running on XP or Vista, and the performance was acceptable even on the low-end 1GB RAM system. Regardless, I wholeheartedly recommend having at least 2GB RAM to run the game. On the main test system the game gobbled up almost 1.5GB RAM, so extra disk access is unavoidable on 1GB systems.
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