Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware box today we're talking about assassin's creed Odyssey again following on from Steve's massive I think he had more than 50 GPUs in its benchmark of the game went up on the channel yesterday as you probably would have quickly realized in that video Odyssey well it just doesn't run very well on some GPUs particularly mid-range options following on from what we saw in 2017 Assassin's Creed origins but there is good news for those concerned about performance well sort of I have benchmarked every quality setting in the game and compared them all visually and I think there is a bit of optimization that can be done to recover some performance without losing visual quality in fact my custom selection of settings ended up delivering performance close to the high preset while delivering visual quality near equivalent to the maximum ultra high preset throughout this video we'll be progressing towards that result and showing you the exact settings you'll need to tweak because Ubisoft default presets are pretty rubbish in my opinion there's a lot of strange choices made and some things that just completely tanked performance for no reason so we'll point those out when we get there however and this is also a bit of a precursor for what's to come Odyssey doesn't scale down particularly well without making the game look like complete garbage you can gain performance at the high end while getting very good visuals but there are plenty of settings that don't give a great boost to framerate when you turn them down despite having a larger effect on quality so yeah it's a bit of a rollercoaster this one as always a few quick notes before we get into it the graphs coming up are in percentage gains not raw FPS because it better illustrates how the setting tweaks apply to your setup we benchmark with a variety of GPUs from both AMD and NVIDIA high-end and mid-range and averaged out the results so what you see here should apply to roughly every GPU give or take a few percentage points and if there's anything that might affect one GP over another we do point that out we did still test using our core i7 8700 K test rig overclocked to 4.9 gigahertz so we were entirely GPU bound in this it is a fairly demanding game on the CPU but when you're playing at higher resolutions like 1440p at 4k tends to still be GPU bound and lastly all captured boards you see he is from an RT X 20 a TTI running the game at 4k Steve used the built-in benchmark for testing I used a few custom in-game benchmarks to better capture the impact of all the game settings so results between what Steve showed in this video yesterday and what I show here may differ a little we also recommend watching this video at youtube's maximum 4k quality or you can download a source quality file from our patreon page so first we'll start with the presets I really don't recommend using the presets but understandably some people will just want to choose the best one out of the five Odyssey provides because it's you know pretty easy and to be honest when putting them all side-by-side there's not a lot of visual difference that's immediately noticeable particularly between ultra high very high and high with medium you start to see reduced texture and shadow quality as well as a general reduction to the lining system while with low everything is stripped back particularly textures which are now well definitely potato quality the differences between the highest three are the most nuanced with each mode offering slightly better shadows interestingly the point at which low resolution shadows are swapped for high resolution shadows remains the same for all presets however the high presets use better quality shadows for both far and near shadows aside from minor improvements to clouds water quality and ambient occlusion the high presets also offer better draw distance it's much noticeable in the benchmark but it also looks similar to this in the more densely populated areas of the game ultra high renders higher quality objects further out and this distance is reduced for very high and high I find the level of poppy and pretty noticeable for the high preset having entire objects pop out of thin air quite close to the camera is a bit jarring it'll be nice for the game to better handle those transitions when it comes to performance you'll want to immediately switch from ultra high to very high as there's a pretty small visual difference here and while the performance improvement in our benchmark was only 12 percent or so that margin is higher on low-end cards and lower resolutions as some of the sayings opt users are particularly taxing Steve showed up to a 30% improvement on it dx10 60 at 1080p using the built-in benchmark you are gonna see less than that in the actual game but it's still a big performance uplift simply from shifting down to very high however our preference here is actually to use the high preset you do get reduced shadow quality and view distance compared to very high but we're looking at a 12% increase in performance in our non canned benchmark and a 25% improvement over ultra medium is also a good choice for mid tier GPUs giving a reduction in quality for a boost in performance unfortunately I think the medium preset is really where the game tops out as low looks pretty terrible so at best we're seeing a forty seven percent improvement between ultra and medium that's not surprising considering what we saw with origins but it's disappointing when you look at the overall performance of the title now the fun begins as we move into looking at every single game setting in detail and there are some absolute shockers in here so stay tuned we'll start with anti-aliasing because this is a strange one obviously actually has four modes here and all but off I guess use temporal anti-aliasing or taa to some degree Odyssey is taa implementation is not great it's improved slightly compared to origins from what I could see just doing some pretty basic visual comparisons but it's still a bit blurry in some instances reducing the clarity of the game's excellent texture work the high mode for example does cut out shimmering and most area Singh butts at the expense of a very soft presentation which looks a bit blurred even at 4k I feel this game is really missing an SMA option I tried to add that in with rece shade but I only tested for about two minutes and I couldn't get the game to load properly SMA would better preserve fine detail while removing a lot of the aliasing for little performance cost bits in the medium and low anti-aliasing modes that are particularly interesting it's hard to tell but I think Ubisoft is using some form of temporal reconstruction when you enable medium or low in other words the game is being rendered at a sub native resolution then temporally upscale to whatever resolution is set that's because both of these modes provide a performance improvement compared to no anti-aliasing and both medium and especially low are even less blessed with detail than high looking at the performance breakdown you get 5% more performance with medium and 16% more width low compared to high or no anti-aliasing both which deliver the same performance normally anti-aliasing decreases performance but whenever you see better performance again it's likely using some sort of reconstruction technique I haven't spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what's going on but after looking at some comparisons my guess is low actually renders the 4k image at 1800 P or there abouts if you're really struggling for performance you might like to experiment with low but for me the presentation is far too soft I'd stick with high or even no anti-aliasing here particularly at 4k shadow quality I touched on a bit when discussing presets this city impacts two key elements the resolution our close-up shadows and the quality of shadow is further from the camera the point at which you see the transition between close and far shadows doesn't change so all modes have some level of popping which is a bit disappointing this game engine certainly doesn't have a blending feature that's as nice as some others ultra high comfortably has the highest resolution shadows both near and far and that helps reduce the visibility of the transition everything from very high down uses a pretty low resolution far shadow and there's not a great difference overall between very high and high medium and then low both step down the resolution of closest shadows the setting is the tough one to choose from there's no significant performance difference between very high and medium so the easy choice there among those is using very high you do get around a 3 percent uplift shifting from ultra high to very high but it comes at a noticeable loss in quality with greater pop and visibility I reckon this is one of the more noticeable visual downgrades in the game so if you have the GPU power I'd really recommend keeping it on ultra high and trying to sacrifice a bit from the other less important settings if you'd rather get more performance very high is a good choice environment details only impacts draw distance the amount of items loaded and general geometry quality at close range does not change with this setting so here it's all about choosing a level of tolerance for pop in ultra high giving by far the least noticeable pop in while a mode like high you'll spot objects appearing out of thin air for a bit as you move around the busier village areas the good news is the setting doesn't have a large impact on performance particularly if you have a decent amount of VRAM there is effectively no difference to average performance and a slight dip to one Loes when comparing ultra high and high then medium and especially low give minor improvements the level of poppy at medium and low is pretty crazy so I'd honestly stick to ultra high here and this you of VRAM or memory performance are limited texture detail is an obvious choice as with most games you want to use the highest possible setting unless you're running out of video memory for the resolution you are playing at high at 4k only allocates a touch over 6 gigabytes on a 28 eti so I suspect most people with mid to high end graphics cards will be fine here odyssey's texture quality setting does have a larger than usual impact to low textures look absolutely awful while high is noticeably sharper than medium and in general the texture work in this game is too good to waste so stick to high unless you have 4 gigabytes of vram or less and as is the case with most texture settings there is no significant impact of performance unless you select low terrain quality isn't worth discussing in depth because there's no difference in performance between high and medium which are the only two settings high is slightly superior visually but with no performance difference it doesn't really matter just stick it on high clutter is another thing that doesn't really impact performance all that much but it does impact how dense foliage and other similar elements are optical grass density clutter but whatever Ubisoft ultra has slightly better draw distance for those elements than medium while low disables a lot of the grass looking at performance you'll only start to see a performance improvement on low which looks pretty poor so just stick this one on the maximum setting fog is the setting that has a very subtle effect in some areas but has a significant impact on performance as far as I could tell there was almost no difference between high and medium while low appears to reduce fog density to a minimum level when looking at performance turning down fog from high to medium improve frame rates by 4% on average which is a pretty large difference considering the visual change though I should note you only see this performance improvement in areas with fog low could also be a decent option if you want a bit of extra performance at the expense of basically removing most of this affect the water quality setting affects the draw distance and visibility of objects beneath the vast ocean surfaces in the game without noticeably affecting the quality of the beautiful water simulation itself there's little difference between very high and high but when you step down to medium deeper parts of the ocean disappear from view low is like a boring water mode only showing you objects at a very close distance again the performance numbers here relate to scenes with a lot of water and there's a nice cadence between each of the settings are not for high here as it's a noticeable step up from medium though we could understand opting for medium if you want a bit more performance low-end gamers can use low without completely destroying the quality of water which is nice screen space for reflections again mostly impact the quality of water surfaces whether that's the ocean or puddles around the environment SSR provides a more accurate and realistic surface reflection simulation and it really does look fantastic when enabled especially when you put it side-by-side with the game running with that SSR interestingly medium looks pretty close to off so I don't see any reason to use the off mode particularly when we look at the performance impact and there's no real difference between medium and off here either turning from high to medium will give you a two percent performance improvement but that's not worth it considering the large visual upgrade that SSR provides volumetric clouds is the crazy killer setting in Assassin's Creed Odyssey turn this setting way up and watch your framerate fall to its knees this game does have a very nice volumetric cloud simulation especially in stormy conditions but seriously the performance hit is ridiculous relative to the visual difference looking here ultra high does have more voluminous more detailed clouds than high but the difference really isn't that massive and the sky isn't an area will be focused on for most of the game medium and especially low dropped cloud quality further but seriously look at these performance differences a whopping 40% improvement simply from switching volumetric clouds from ultra high to high and to make matters crazier this performance Delta was recorded in the exact scene you saw earlier which isn't all that visually impressive and even worse you see very similar Delta's in area of the game with only a small portion of the sky in view so it's well worth turning the Saint down to gain a ton of performance my preference to you is to use the high setting though again medium is a good option for those on lower tier hardware on the RT x20 atti at 4k going from ultra high to high so frame rates in one section jump from 44 FPS on average to over 60 FPS which is a mind-boggling difference for such a small visual downgrade even going from very high used with the very high preset Steve benchmark with too high delivers a large performance improvement in most areas of the game toning their setting down is an absolute must for performance on a much less interesting note Ubisoft provides a separate quality setting for character textures as opposed to general environment textures again this setting makes very little difference to performance and high delivers the best visual quality so stick with high character quality was a bit of an enigma I didn't really spot much of a difference if anything there was a very slight reduction to the character models between ultra high and low there wasn't a significant difference in performance either though I'd recommend dropping from ultra high to very high for a slight gain in MPC dense areas for basically no visual difference nearly at the end of this one next up is ambient occlusion they're sending effects soft shadowing in the general depth of the game world with off looking a lot flatter than any of the three ambient occlusion modes very high gives the greatest level of shadowing and the most realistic depth with high only giving a small decrease and medium another small decrease I think high does look slightly better than medium so I'd recommend splitting the difference in going with high though medium is a good choice for those with less powerful hardware gaining 2% here for a small quality loss is a good result the final setting in the game is depth of field this one comes into play when talking to NPCs the quality of the effect is very high but it's also very punishing causing a decent drop in frame rate when instigating a conversation there isn't any difference between high and low though so if you like the depth of field effect I want to keep it enabled there's no point using low as it gives no performance improvement and no visual improvement disabling it could be a very good option though as you'll see 12 percent better performance when the effect is active now that all that's done let's summarize it all and show you our final custom settings that we recommend for playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey as I said earlier the standard presets aren't great particularly as very high uses a punishing volumetric cloud city while missing out on the superior shadows and draw distances provided by the ultra high preset high corrects the volumetric lighting issue but gives reduced visual quality in a number of areas so our custom settings you see here I designed to give as close to ultra high as possible without the massive performance hit of that preset of course the game overall is quite punishing so for those with mid-range systems and recommend a few different settings like dropping shadows to very high water quality to medium or low volumetric clouds to medium and ambient occlusion to medium while maintaining the other settings where you put our custom preset beside the ultra high and high presets you can see we're getting pretty close to ultra high especially in terms of shadow quality draw distance is also much improved as you move throughout the world and the good news is we've improved performance by roughly 20 percent with these custom settings over the ultra-high preset in general gameplay sometimes much more than that when a cloud system really ramps up this puts performance between the very high and high presets while offering better visuals with the game this pop demised that's a huge win for those struggling for frame rate while this is great news for those that wanted ultra quality visuals at better levels of performance unfortunately Odyssey doesn't have a lot of room for reducing quality to get the game running better on say a GTX 1050 TI a lot of the settings have very little performance impact after a certain point often for large drops in visuals textures for example look absolutely terrible on low for basically no performance uplift environment detail as well impacts draw distance and gives a disappointingly low frame rate uplift on lower settings overall I feel that Ubisoft probably could have done a lot more to get this game running better on mid-range Hardware having the presets use a more sensible volumetric cloud setting would be a start but it would be great if you could turn down the density or geometry level of on-screen objects - I think Louis back gamers would be happy to sacrifice a few high quality pots and walls to get this game running better and this certainly is a very dense game world here with lots of elements I think if there was an ability to turn down some of those elements you could get better performance on lower tier systems but you simply can't make that change with the current array of settings and as Steve mentioned in his video - I suspect many of the performance issues are from trying to do too much with the current aging game engine that's it for this look at assassin's creed Odyssey and all of its graphics settings hopefully our custom configuration will you squeeze more out of your system and cut away some of Ubisoft sport optimization if you want to check out a source quality version of this video at 4k 100 megabit per second there's a download link for our patreon in the description below give this all I can subscribe to if you want to see more of these videos and I'll catch you in the next one