Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag PC game & performance review

Graphics and IQ

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag has excellent graphics. It is perhaps not quite up to the level of Crysis 3 or Battlefield 4, but it is sufficient to give excellent visuals when everything is maxed out. We played the entire game at 2560×1600 using a single stock GTX 780 Ti and Core i7-3770K overclocked to 4.5GHz.

The implementation of FXAA in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is OK and the text is not blurred. 4xMSAA can be used but the performance hit is high and 4xAA actually does not look as good as 2xTXAA which does a great job of eliminating shimmering at a slight cost of blur.  SMAA is an improvement over TXAA but the temporal aliasing (texture crawling and shimmering) is annoying and it is only slightly mitigated by 4xMSAA.

We preferred to play Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag on a single display at 2560×1600 for best immersion. We did not enjoy playing Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag in Stereoscopic 3D even though it is rated “Good” for 3D Vision 2 by Nvidia.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag offers support for DirectX 11 tessellation which is a good way to increase the level of detail in a scene with a relatively minimal performance impact. The character models are well-tessellated which gives them a much more natural look. Also, the rendering of the hair is improved and the clothing moves naturally when Edward interacts with the environment.

IQ comparisons of Anti-aliasing at 2560×1600 with maxed out settings

Here are screenshots from the game.  Unfortunately, due to the dynamic nature of the game, they are not identical although they illustrate the differences in AA methods. Unless marked as SSAO for comparison with HBAO+, all screenshots are at 2560×1600 with completely maxed out settings including High Soft Shadows and HBAO+. Make sure to open each screenshot up in a separate window to compare them to each other at full size. First up, with no anti-aliasing, it is pretty easy to pick out the jaggies:

No AA

FXAA

SMAA

4xMSAA

2x TXAA

From viewing the screenshots, MSAA looks the best.  One can see the slight blur of TXAA as well as with FXAA and SMAA.  However, with the camera in motion, there is no contest.  2x TXAA is sufficient to provide a similar amount of anti-aliasing to 4xMSAA but with less of a performance hit and with much less crawling and shimmering.  TXAA wins!

HBAO+ vs SSAO

There isn’t a very large hit from running HBAO+ over SSAO but the effects are quite subtle even from looking at screenshots.  Compare the next two SSAO screenshots with the two corresponding preceding ones that were all taken with HBAO+

SMAA/SSAO

4xMSAA/SSAO

It is probably easiest to open two or three images at a time in separate windows or tabs and compare between them. Look especially at the wooden planks in the dock and at the sign letters in “Pyrates Beware”.

In each case, we would prefer the FXAA implementation in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag over no anti-aliasing at all. SMAA is an improvement over FXAA, and 4xMSAA is still better for screen shots or when the camera is not in motion.  Overall, we preferred 2x TXAA.  On the next page, we will look at the performance hit for six video cards using each of the above settings and also at 1920×1080.

The graphics in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag are excellent and the game also supports Stereoscopic 3D (S3D) and especially 3D Vision 1/2.

3D Vision

3D Vision offers a more immersive stereoscopic 3D experience over playing the game in 2D. A combination of high-tech wireless glasses and advanced software, 3D Vision’s drivers automatically transforms over 500 PC games into full stereoscopic 3D. In addition, you can watch Blu-ray 3D, view 3D digital photographs, and even stream YouTube 3D videos.

“Good”

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is rated “Good” by Nvidia.  They recommend turning off shadows although it isn’t possible from the in-game menu.  Unfortunately, some action and objects aren’t in good relationship to each other and we find that the game is actually “fair” to “poor” with 3D Vision. The depth can be adjusted to eliminate some of the ghosting but we think it needs more work to be really decent for playing in S3D.

Of course, there is a performance penalty for playing with 3D Vision. The expected performance hit when playing it with everything maxed out did slow down our GTX 780 Ti in the most intense scenes to the upper 20s fps with 2x TXAA and to the upper 30s with FXAA at 1920×1080.  In the next section, we will give the 3D Vision performance charts.

Let’s look at the game’s system requirements as well as the more specific recommendations for playing with GeForce cards and playable settings at 2560×1600 and 1920×1080 as well as for 3D Vision.  Then we will wrap it up and give our conclusion