Assassin's Creed PC

Test Setup

We have two "similar" systems that we used to test AC, one using ATI graphics and one using NVIDIA graphics. It's important to note that these are not identical systems, as the hardware we had on hand is limited. Specifically, SLI support requires an NVIDIA chipset and CrossFire support requires an Intel or AMD chipset. Our NVIDIA testbed comes courtesy of Dell, their midrange XPS 630 that uses the nForce 650i chipset. Our ATI testbed is the same X38 platform we have used in previous gaming articles. It includes more memory (which doesn't affect performance) rated at DDR2-800 and Windows Vista 64-bit. Thus, it is worth noting that we are not comparing apples-to-apples... or at best, we're comparing Granny Smiths with Fuji apples.

In the processor department, the two systems are identical, sporting Intel's Q6600 revision G0 quad-core processor. Both systems also support overclocking, and we will investigate how that affects performance. The Dell system could only run reliably at around 3.0GHz, so we chose that frequency as a comparison point, simulating a QX6850 CPU (9x333MHz on a 1333FSB). Finally, we tested in both single and dual-GPU configurations on both systems. We're not using this to come to a strict conclusion on whether ATI or NVIDIA graphics are better for running AC, but rather to get a general idea of what sort of hardware is required to run the game well.

Before we get to the actual benchmark results, we want to define some of the settings we'll be using. For benchmarking purposes, we tested at Medium, High, and 4xAA. Note that we also left Level of Detail at maximum for the benchmarks, and the crowd density was likewise set to maximum. Medium drops the Shadows and Graphic Detail settings down one notch. Additional testing of lower detail settings can be found further in the article.

Note: if you're not interested in performance testing, you may want to skip to the conclusion.