Welcome to GamingBolt’s visual analysis of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. After spending a few hours with the PS4 and Xbox One versions, we decided to share our initial impressions with you. Note that an in-depth analysis will be published later.
Last year’s Assassin’s Creed Unity had some performance issues on both the PS4 and Xbox One. For the most part, Unity ran at 30 frames per second on the consoles but there were some drastic frame rate drops here and there. Overall, Ubisoft tried their best by releasing as many performance patches as possible but still, the game struggled to run at a locked 30 fps on consoles. Including an incredible number of NPCs, each with their own AI and animations took a toll on the somewhat weaker CPUs found in the PS4 and Xbox One.
Head to head comparison between PS4 and Xbox One versions of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. Please select 1080p and 60fps playback option for best possible video quality.
However in Syndicate, things have been dialed down by a few notches. The NPC count seems to have been reduced resulting into less overhead on the CPU. This is perhaps due to vehicle battles which are heavy on physics and this must have consumed some of the rendering resources. Syndicate runs on Ubisoft’s next gen tool sets and framework, called as the AnvilNext 2.0 game engine. This engine was used in Unity and will be used for Rainbow Six Siege, For Honor and Ghost Recon Wildlands.
The fantastic skin shaders and tress technology returns in Syndicate with characters, objects and environments boasting physical based rendering properties and amazing custom global illumination solutions. Several post processing effects like depth of field and blur, high dynamic range lighting along with somewhat detailed screen space reflections and parallax occlusion return. The game utilizes a custom AA solution similar to FXAA which helps to keep the jaggies in check. But at the end of the day, we can’t help but feel that things have been toned down in Syndicate. You won’t observe the ”painting in motion” graphical style of Unity in Syndicate. Don’t get us wrong, it’s still a pretty looking game but it lacks when compared with Unity.
As far as pixel count goes, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate runs at 900p on both PS4 and Xbox One. Regardless, the game manages to perform better than Unity. The game runs at an almost locked 30 fps on both consoles with minimal frame rate drops, especially during scenes where the NPC count goes up. We also encountered invisible NPC glitches at times. Oh my!
We will see how it all pans out in our final analysis of Syndicate. Stay tuned.