When players of Assassin’s Creed Origins – and the recently released Assassin’s Creed Odyssey – faced high CPU usage on PC, anti-tampering software Denuvo was thought to be the culprit. However, prolific modder Kaldaien – whose work ranges for mods of several titles, from Nier: Automata to Monster Hunter World – discovered something interesting in creating the SpecialK mod for Odyssey.
He noted on GitHub that the high CPU usage was actually due to the driver overhead’s resource management. Due to a conservative resource ceiling on textures, assets would be reloaded hundreds of thousands of times every hour. If you own a solid-state drive, the CPU usage would be even higher. Thankfully, it seems that fixing the issue shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
“It should be easily fixable. Clearly the dev. team focuses on consoles because there appears to be no consideration given to the significantly higher throughput of PC storage devices such as my NVMe SSDs in RAID0. The faster your disk is and the more CPU cores you have, the more of an unpredictable performance nightmare this all becomes,” said Kaldaien.
Ubisoft has been fairly responsive with regards to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey issues – the recent PC update allowed older CPUs without AVX support to properly play the game, and overall stability has been improved. Those on consoles also received some fixes courtesy of update 1.04, including crash for those starting a New Game on Xbox One, so check that out as well.