Leader for the rendering team on Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag at Ubisoft Montreal Luc Poirier has spoken about the latest features that the game will take advantage of on PC including DirectX 11 and how the new AnvilNext engine.
On whether ACIV would be better optimized for multi-core CPUs unlike its predecessor – but more along the lines of Splinter Cell: Blacklist – Poirier stated, “There was a major optimisation pass that was done on the engine, not just for the PC, but for every platform. The scheduler used for the rendering was rewritten from the ground up. In AC4, the engine will use all the cores it needs until it sees that using more cores brings no more gain. So, yes we should expect better performance on PC than AC3, especially on DX11 hardware, ” he said to DSOGaming,
ACIV on PC will also feature all the next-gen features seen on the consoles. “On top of that, the team at Ubisoft Kiev worked on several PC specific features, like improved HBAO, MSAA, contact hardening soft shadows and improved sun rays. The UI has been updated for the PC version.
“Also, Nvidia card owners will have access, like you mentioned, to TXAA, but also to the GeForce Experience: graphics options will be automatically adjusted in accordance to the user GPU and machine. Also, as usual, the PC version will be scalable, so the user with an older GPU will be able to disable some features to make the game run smoothly on his hardware.”
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag will release on October 29th in North America and November 1st in Europe for Xbox 360 and PS3, with next-gen releases due when the PS4 and Xbox One launch in November. Meanwhile, the PC version will release on November 19th in North America and November 22nd in Europe.