Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced visuals have been getting a lot of attention, and rightly so. The upgrades they’re bringing to a very memorable take on the Caribbean Islands during the Age of Piracy are quite tangible, and we’ve talked a lot about them in the run up to a title that’s now a mere day away from its global release. We’ve had a chance to dive in early, and have been spending a lot of time on The Jackdaw’s deck and on the shores of countless islands.
Why? Well, perks of the job aside, we’ve done that to touch upon what’s different from the original, and how that transforms the experience on offer across the board with a special focus on PC and PS5 Pro. Can the latest Anvil tech make this one go beyond an overhaul of resolutions and textures to make its world feel alive in ways that weren’t possible in the original game? Can that very impressive rendering stack manage to draw you into a familiar story well enough to make you want to do it all again?
Let’s find out!
What’s New?
The Caribbean continues to be the star of the show in Resynced, just as it was in the original Black Flag. It isn’t just the OG experience with a sharper image, and it’s so much more alive this time around that you feel the difference quite early. We’re going to just come out and say that Black Flag was no mean feat when it was first released, and managed to look and feel pretty good for a cross-generational title looking to bridge the PS4 and Xbox One with their predecessors.
But of course, it was limited by the machines it was made to run on, relying on fixed approximations about what its world should look like in any given scenario. It was an approach that worked pretty well for the game back in the day given that it was probably the only way to make such titles look as good as they did. But things have changed now, and the world itself enjoys the kind of adaptability that served Edward as well as it did over his journey from a pirate to an Assassin.
Let’s begin with the seas, since around 60% of the game’s world is made up of it. The upgrades go beyond better reflections, better-looking waves and foam, and more realistic collisions. Those were kind of taken for granted at this point given the extensive showcases the developer has given us all in the run up to Resynced’s release. But it’s in how the water reacts to you, your ship, and the world around it to present a more active sea this time around where the remake shines over the original.
Of course, the illusion of an active sea was always a part of the experience, with Black Flag weaving in wave motion, realistic responses from your ship to the pull and tug of the sea, storms that immediately made your survival a question mark and a matter of accurately reading rogue waves, great foam and how readable naval combat was once you found your sea legs. Well, each of those factors is now even better, with a physicality based water pipeline doing a lot of work under the hood to make the sea feel all the more responsive while looking like an endless vacation spot all at the same time.
New tessellation techniques, volumetric foam generation, dynamic bubble systems, and the way water responds to multiple variables like your ship, the wind, and the weather to generate accurate, realistic reactions every time make for a presentation of the sea that makes it feel like a living canvas just waiting for you to trace lines of adventure on with the Jackdaw as your brush. The seas were always where Black Flag’s best thrills were to be found, and Resynced’s take on them sets its world up for success on many fronts.
Take the weather, for example. It’s changed from being a very good take on realistic weather effects to an entire simulation that constantly works behind the scenes to make the seas feel truly treacherous this time around. You could set out with the sun shining bright on The Jackdaw’s deck, and find yourself in cloudy weather a little while later, all of which happens so seamlessly it can be hard to notice unless you’re actively watching for it.
The Atmos tech is doing its job, allowing variables like temperatures, humidity, the wind, and vapor density to intersect with results that make the weather system in Resynced a logical extension of how it impacted the world in Shadows. Those changing seasons are now a part of the world’s fabric, and it’s honestly impressive to see how the seas can turn against you as if Calypso herself took issue with Edward’s presence in them.
Of course, we’d be remiss not to talk about the new lighting system, which brings fully dynamic lighting and ray tracing to the table to light it, and everything else its rays touch, right up. You’re going to see it working its magic the second you move off a brightly lit street into a shady alley, the environment getting suitably less bright to match the scene while stray rays still sneak past thin leaves to cast thin pockets of light, surrounded by very realistic shadows.
It’s in how the world looks so drastically different and consistently beautiful at both dawn and dusk, each scene being lit up by systems that are dynamically responding to the time of day instead of being pre-rendered to present an approximation of it. The reflections of moisture off your armor or metallic surfaces are so realistically done, as is the spray of the ocean or the damage you do to enemy ships when you take them on.
Embers glide on the wind among raindrops as you unleash The Jackdaw’s might amid a raging storm, and every explosion lights up the pitch blackness of the open seas in ways that make each one feel like a glimpse into the fate that awaits you should your next shot miss. We could go on, but we’re going to say that the new lighting system is an excellent and very welcome upgrade, working well to make the world react as well to light as it does on other fronts.
Of course, the new Anvil Engine has also brought a lot of improvements to other factors like draw distances, visibility in areas where it’s a factor, and camera perspectives that work to elevate the scene being presented. SSD-backed streaming of smaller clusters is amazing on this front, and it’s evident as soon as you whip out your spyglass and peer off into the distance at an island you’re thinking of stopping at. There is no pop-in whatsoever, and the details look excellent.
Sailing towards a fort or settlement lets you see activity in the distance, instead of NPCs just hanging out statically until you alter the world state by initiating conflict. The jungle geometry is a perfect balance between the exploreable ones on offer in Black Flag, and the impenetrably dense foliage that Japan had in Shadows. Rock formations in the distance look as good as city skylines, and the entire rendering system does so well, it feels like Resynced might have needed an entirely new Animus to present a Caribbean simulation that looks and feels so real.
Of course, all of these graphical improvements would mean nothing if the performance didn’t manage to keep up. Well, there’s good news on that front as well.
PC Performance
You can bet we’ve put Resynced through its paces to see how it holds up under pressure. Our PC build includes an NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti, an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, and 16GB of RAM. That’s a reasonably powerful setup, and we set our resolution to 4K with the maximum available settings and DLSS set to Balanced. With that powering the experience, we managed a consistent 45-55 FPS which is pretty good given the recommended setups to run the game at its absolute best.
The official recommendation for 4K/60 FPS gameplay with extended ray tracing and quality upscaling requires an RTX 4090/RX 7900 XTX with a Ryzen Ryzen 7 5700X3D/Core i7-12700K-class CPU. On paper, our setup should have capped out at 1440p/60 FPS at high settings with standard ray tracing and Balanced upscaling. That makes what Resynced managed to offer quite impressive on the performance front considering everything we’ve talked about on the graphical one stretching our system to its limits.
PS5 Pro Is A Powerhouse
Well, that sorts out the PC. What about the PS5 Pro? We know that its Performance Mode offers 2160p upscaling with Enhanced PSSR, 60 FPS, and extended ray tracing while the Fidelity Mode goes for 30 FPS and Balanced goes for 40 FPS with the rest of it remaining the same. There’s specular reflections and ray-traced global illumination on board as well, with strand-based hair for Edward in all modes (you get it on nearby NPCs as well with Fidelity on), and the same across the board in all cinematics.
We tested things out across all three modes and came away impressed with the results, thanks to very little fluctuations in target goal of performance paramerers. We’d personally pick Performance Mode for that silky smooth frame rate and its impact on combat. What’s next? Well we think it a good idea to give you a comparison between the Pro’s Fidelity Mode and our PC. As far as the image is concerned, the PC handled distant geometry a lot better, and edged out the Pro when it came to fine ropes on rigging or vegetation, the foliage itself, and the general level of detail on a sub pixel level. That isn’t really a surprise but what’s surprising is that the Pro doesn’t lag too far behind.
That’s kind of a pattern here, as the ray-traced lighting is similarly effective with the PC managing to edge ahead in who interiors are lit up, how the light handles indirect bounce, transitions between different times of the day, and shaded streets. It’s the same thing with the reflections on oceans, wet floors of decks, metal surfaces, and any surface that’s showing off the aftermath of rains. You’re going to find more details on distant settlements, fortifications, and the silhouettes of cities that you’re approaching through fog or at night.
The strand-based hair tech works just as well on the Pro as it does on the PC although having it in operation at a higher frame rate output on the PC is an advantage. The latter also gets a distinct advantage in how different weather scenes play out, with storm complexity, the ocean’s response to your actions, and the chaos of the sea feeling that much better on the PC versus the Pro’s Fidelity Mode.
Once again, the most impressive part of the comparison is that aside from the lower frame rate, the PS5 Pro hasn’t been completely outclassed by its PC counterpart as far as Resynced is concerned, and you’re going to have a hell of a good time on either system if your PC can come close to the recommended specs from the developer.
With all that’s been said, we suppose you’ve already guessed that as far as graphics and performance are concerned, Black Flag Resynced is quite an impressive upgrade, and an experience that makes the remake feel like an evolution of its world instead of a mere visual overhaul.
We’ve already covered how Edward’s adventure has made the trip from our past to the present in our full review of the game, but as far as the graphics go, this is a fantastic effort at a remake. We’re definitely throwing a hat in the air for the team behind it in appreciation of a job well done.
