Gadgetory

hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus dotnet and this is our Assassin's Creed syndicate benchmark which looks at the game across various graphics settings including one of our own custom configurations that we used for most testing and that was created specifically to ensure fairness between Nvidia and AMD GPUs and I'll explain why that methodology is important going forward so Assassin's Creed syndicate is a particularly interesting game the benchmark even if you're not going to play it and that's because if we look at previous AC titles unity in particular the game is one of the few games out there that will actually make use of the additional vram provided by some lower and mid tier cards including as an easy example the gtx 960 where you have two gigabyte and four gigabyte models available in the case of unity we saw that there is actually a measurable impact between two and four gigabytes on the same gtx 960 outside of some changes because there were different brands and you can watch the whole video on that if you're interested but it made for a cool benchmarking title that's why we're back along with other reasons like to see how the game works and how it performs so Assassin's Creed syndicate some important things to know this is a very GPU intensive title and it's very geometrically complex there's a lot of Polly's but it's not overly it's not overdoing it with poly count as some games do there's definitely a lot of them but the game does try to push fidelity through shadows and lighting as a very sort of less heavy-handed way to show the fidelity of the game the higher graphics quality without necessarily just flooding you with polygons so that is something that AC is known for really leveraging their shadows and lighting which makes sense because none of the day they are trying to appear at least how much like a stealthy game so this game also is a game works title which means that it does include some of Nvidia's proprietary technology and these are things that we generally disabled for testing between AMD and nvidia to ensure a level test platform but to recap what's in there because you will be hearing a lot about it this week and today especially the main items are shadow works which include p CSS or percentage closer soft shadows and that has a pretty big impact on performance on nvidia and AMD and then there's temporal anti-aliasing is in there which is not a shadow works tech but it is an anti-aliasing technology and TX AAA basically says I'm going to do anti-aliasing I'm going to take two or four taps per pixel or two or four X as you may know it and take those over multiple frames so you're analyzing it over multiple frames makes a little bit less immediately intensive and allows for the removal of some things like the marching pixels or marching ants effect that you get with shimmering and thin objects like grass where it's tall and thin and txa a will help remove that but it is ultimately an nvidia accelerated technology so we disable it for most of our testing the other tech in here other than pcs s is Nvidia's HBA oh and HBA o+ which is another form of ambient occlusion the HB version of ambient occlusion is a little more aggressive it creates a slightly more realistic look based on the lights position so if I have the Sun behind me and you pretend that wall as a window the sun shining through it HBA Oh we'll have a pretty big impact on how that shows that the shadows and the shading between connected surfaces within the game but again and video accelerated so we disable it for most tests the alternative is SSAO and that's what we use so to go over the settings for our benchmark whenever you see though or hear the word custom settings or ultra custom as we've called it that means one thing it means we've gone to ultra high within Assassin's Creed syndicate and we've changed the anti-aliasing down to only FXAA for a couple of reasons which I'll explain we've changed shadows from pcs s2 only high within the game and then we've changed ambient occlusion to SSAO and that's to create a perfectly level bench between AMD and be in our testing we saw about a twenty percent performance hit from PCs s being enabled so just pc SS vs high for shadows and we saw close to a thirty-six percent hit with pcs s ultra which is a little bit more aggressive against the high shadow setting again so pretty big performance disparity there and you really shouldn't be using it unless you've got some high-powered GPU set up with anti-aliasing we saw another big hit with MSA a 2x plus FXAA versus just FXAA the impact was about twenty four point seven percent somewhere in that range about twenty five percent on average and for that reason we opted for only FXAA for almost all of our testing some tests including the 1080p ultra-high tests were conducted with the anti-aliasing msaa option enabled so you do have it there if you actually want to play with MSAA and the big thing here is just the performance it's so massive that we didn't want to present the game as unplayable because you're taking a 25-percent hit from anti-aliasing which quite a few people can live without but we tested both for those who wanted let's get into the benchmarks here if it hasn't already been shown in this video at this point the 30-second bench mark course is available on our YouTube channel it was rendered at 4k but we downsampled it to 1080p 60 for YouTube purposes and that's available if you want to see how we tested it and try and replicate our results starting at 4k Assassin's Creed syndicate is effectively unplayable at our tested settings that doesn't mean it's unplayable period at 4k but at our settings it is at a time of testing we were unable to get an SLI configuration functioning within Assassin's Creed syndicate I did use the brand-new 359 drivers that at time of testing were not available and these are optimized for AC syndicates so we contacted n video we're talking to them and we're trying to figure out hey is this normal or if there's something screwy going on on our driver setup I'll update on the website as soon as what you hear back but for now SLI did not work and we were unable to find a single GPU configuration that would adequately play Assassin's Creed syndicate at our custom settings arrangement using lower graphics output closer to medium for example or low or medium maybe a little bit of high the 980 TI would be a contender but that sort of eliminates the point of high resolution gaming because now you're losing a lot of your fidelity and the GPU just can't keep up with the load generated by AC syndicate at 4k with ultra and custom settings and it does struggle even at things like high or very high so the 60 FPS metric is kind of just out of reach of our highest tier cards that we have in-house here as always I don't currently have the fury X it was on loan when we first tested it so I don't have one now I'm sorry but we're trying to get one the 980 I though is a pretty good representation of where things fall moving down to 1440p shows things in a more playable light the 980 TI runs at about sixty six FPS average with fairly strong one percent and point one percent lows and is what we would deem a playable card for these higher settings the GTX 980 non ti holds on at about 57 FPS average but could do with a slight settings tweak down toward hi for example for maximize playability still 57 FPS for Assassin's Creed is fairly acceptable and since we're not dealing with competitive level framerate demands as in some FPS games this is something that is really reasonable and I would settle on though you will see bigger hits during major combat scenes and things like that that may dictate dropping to a high ultra hybrid set up at 1440p the brand new r9 380 x pushes just under 40 FPS following shy of playability of 1440 but it is a two hundred thirty dollar card so you can't knock it too hard here and this is with our custom settings so again dropping closer to medium will cut close but then you're losing out on a lot of the fidelity so it's really more of a 1080 performer looking at these charts for something closer to playable we look toward the gtx 980 the 980 I and those are cards priced at 500 and 600 50 respectively the r9 390 x-files below pit the FPS cutting it a bit close there and it would play except ibly at a hybrid of medium and high settings but again you're really cutting it close depending on how close you need to be to 60 FPS to be satisfied as a gamer that's really up to you to decide moving to 1080p with our ultra custom settings the most flooded setting in terms of GPU population by the way there's a lot of cards on here everything from the gtx 960 for gigabyte to the r9 380 x and up the new 380 x can play the game reasonably well sans a few occasional drops and frame rate during heavy load periods but generally they play pretty well the r9 380 which unfortunately we no longer have as it was on loan and had to be sent back would land a couple percent below the 380 x based on history of the other seven or so games we tested the two on and you'll see that in our 380 x review separately this would realistically plant the 380 closer to 50 FPS though we can't validate that obviously as i don't have one but based on knowledge and experience that's about where would land as for cards that we do have the 3 90 x pushes over 60 FPS alongside the gtx 970 up 72 FPS and the 980 and 980 TI are bordering on overkill with these settings so really not necessary to buy one of those but at 1080p with ultra-high not our custom settings the story is a bit different ultra high changes one thing it changes the anti-aliasing from FXAA 24 tab MSAA and that hammers the settings that performance delta to the tune of about twenty percent and these suffers the most here as andy does tend to struggle with things like tessellation and anti-aliasing processing in particular but if you really want anti-aliasing if you need it at 1080 then this is why we tested it this is what you need to look at generally you're in the 980 territory for playing with anti-aliasing enabled the most interesting data in the 1080p benchmarks is the gtx 960 performance where we see the 16 point three percent performance disparities shown favoring the 4 gigabyte card versus the two gigabyte card this is pretty exciting to see as only a few games truly make use of the additional two gigabytes of vram on cards like the 960 or the 380 where you have multiple skus available and this 960 it can sometimes choke on its own core clock which does limit the extent to which the extra vram can be utilized in some games but syndicate shows that there is a clear benefit again about sixteen percent 16 percent for the four gigabyte card bridge the two gigabyte card and shows that there is a place in the market for both of them to exist so then the best cards for Assassin's Creed syndicate depend the resolution you want and assuming no anti-aliasing you're looking at the GTX 970 and the r9 390 X at 1080p with our custom settings the 390 x trails by about seven FPS and our benchmarks but it's still above 60 and it's a bit more affordable it's closer to three hundred dollars sometimes 320 the 970 depending on where you're looking is going to be on average 32 maybe sixty dollars more expensive than the 390 X but those are the two main options to look at for 1080p gaming with near max settings basically if you're willing to drop down to medium still 1080p just medium then the cards to look at would be am these brand new r9 380 x which is two hundred thirty dollars that can play just fine and the existing gtx 960 from nvidia we would recommend the four gigabyte model in this case because again pretty big difference between the two but that's where i'd be looking for the medium ish settings range you can get some probably too high but generally you're on a mix of medium settings and that's putting you in the 200 to 250 dollar range for GPU if you need 1440p gaming the place to look is going to be something like a 980 TI or a fury x which we don't have because it was on my head we had this headed back but one of those cards would put you in the range of 1440p gaming pretty reasonably and if you need to get to 4k it's really going to be a multi-gpu configuration that's the only way to do it and again at time of our testing sli was not presently functional so we couldn't validate that at least not for us it may work I've asked 10 video what's going on we'll see what they say but for our tests SI was not working and as soon as we'll test and see where those two 980 TI is fall and if they can produce a playable frame rate for 4k at the ultra settings so that is all for this video if you like this type of coverage or any of our other coverage of course subscribe check the channel hit that patreon link in the post roll video thank you for watching and supporting the channel the best thing you can do to support us is to watch the videos and to share them with your friends so that's all for this one I'll see you all next time