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Assassin’s Creed Shadowsbeautifully recreates the landscapes and architecture of Feudal Japan. The AnvilNext engine does a great job of simulating the player’s interaction with objects and terrain deformations. However, these beautiful visuals come at a cost, asAC Shadowsrequire powerful PC hardware and may lead to some players experiencing low FPS. However, these best PC settings forAssassin’s Creed Shadowswill help you balance great visuals with buttery-smooth performance.
Best Display Settings for Assassin’s Creed Shadows PC
The first section ofAssassin’s Creed Shadowssettings under the video tab isDisplay, which houses all the resolution, window mode, and upscaler options for players to tweak according to their hardware.
Contains brightness, Contrast, and HDR settings for players to tweak.
Field of View
85
The higher the FOV, the bigger the performance impact. It’s recommended to keep it within the 80-100 threshold.
Display Mode
Borderless Window
There isn’t an exclusive fullscreen option, but the borderless window works just as fine, if not better.
Aspect Ratio
According to Display
It’ll most commonly be either 16:9 or 16:10 for standard displays, with the 21:9 ratio being for ultra-widescreen displays.
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Resolution
Native
It’s best to set the native resolution here and tweak it later on in the upscaler settings.
Frame Rate Limiter
Disabled
It’s recommended to use an upscaler or Native TAA instead of dynamically upscaling in-game visuals.
Upscaler Quality
Quality/Custom
Although players can simply go for the quality preset in the upscaler, they can also choose the custom option to change the resolution target.
Maximum Dynamic Resolution
Personal Preference
If players want to strike a balance between quality visuals and great performance, set the maximum to 50% and the minimum to 45%.
Frame Generation
On
Frame generation may become necessary for players with mid-range PCs to get over 60 FPS.
Best Scalability (Graphics) Settings for Assassin’s Creed Shadows PC
Thegraphics settings (Scalability)tab has all the settings you need to fine-tune the visual quality ofAC Shadowsto strike the perfect balance between graphical fidelity and good FPS.
Raytraced Global Illumination
Diffuse Hideout Only
AC Shadowsdoesn’t let players disable Raytraced GI, so the best you can do is limit it to hideout.
Overall Quality
Custom
We’ll be fine-tuning all the graphics settings, so there’s no need to use a pre-defined preset.
Raytracing Quality
Low
Both options cannot be disabled, so it is best to keep them low to avoid a major performance impact.
Loading Distance
High
Improves the appearance and loading of objects/terrain at various distances. It can be cranked up to very high without a major performance impact.
Terrain Quality
Controls the terrain render quality and how it deforms after players interact with it, e.g., stepping into snow or mud.
Character Quality
Improves the texture resolution of armor and other accessories equipped on the characters.
Hair Strands
Off
Improves the hair quality of characters but does have a significant impact on performance.
Cloud Quality
Medium
Higher than the medium preset can be taxing on overall performance.
Fog Quality
Very High
Fog looks amazing in the environment, and a higher preset does not tax performance that much.
How’s the Optimization for Assassin’s Creed Shadows on PC?
This testing was done on a pre-release build of Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
Assassin’s Creed Shadowsisn’t perfect when it comes to optimization. However, using the best settings above, paired with frame generation, players can get a smooth experience with the game. These settings were tested on a laptop with an Intel i7-11800H CPU, Nvidia RTX 3070 GPU, and 32GB RAM. With these specs, AC Shadows ran at a smooth71 average FPS, with 1% lows at 50 FPS.
Hopefully, developers will be releasing performance path notes post-release, so players will be able to crank up the settings a bit more once that happens.
