Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla Falls Short of 4K 60FPS Ultra on High-End Rigs

A recent development from GameGPU may have some PC owners and Assassin’s Creed fans cringing. In a benchmark for the latest entry in the series, Valhalla, GameGPU found that the game struggled to run at 4K 60FPS – even when using some of the most powerful equipment on the market.

GameGPU ran a few tests of Valhalla, the first on a rig outfitted with Intel’s Core i9-10900K processor and NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3090 GPU. Despite the power delivered by Intel’s processor and NVIDIA’s graphics card, Valhalla couldn’t quite hit 60FPS when run at 4K resolution. Other specs were turned to their max, as well, so the game would be at its most taxing.

Additional tests were run using a rig with an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X processor and GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPU and another with an i9-9900K processor paired with a Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card. The latter benchmark was performed at 1080p, which offered a smoother experience at the cost of resolution.

At 4K resolution, the game teetered around 56FPS, with a remarked drop to 40FPS in a few resource-heavy sections of the game. While not entirely damning for the game, PC gamers that spent $1,200 may be disappointed to find their high-end GPU can’t tackle the latest AAA title. Despite the RTX 3090’s ability to run Horizon Zero Dawn on Ultra settings at around 80FPS, it’s not quite powerful enough for Ubisoft’s 9^th-century setting.

Valhalla isn’t the only new Ubisoft game giving PC players issues. Watch Dogs Legion is also dropping below 60FPS on Ultra settings. Things get even worse when ray tracing is enabled. The one hope players still have is that Ubisoft will release a day-one (or close to day-one) patch that will tweak the game’s performance and optimize its visuals.

For a glimpse at how Valhalla performed on these three rigs, check out the videos below.

The latest entry in the Assassin’s Creed series launches on Nov. 10, 2020, for PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. When the PS5 drops on Nov. 12, Valhalla will join it as a launch title. According to Ubisoft, its new title will perform quite well on the next generation of consoles. A blog post confirmed that Valhalla would have no issue hitting 60FPS, though there was one caveat.

While Xbox Series X will top the open-world game out at 4K and 60FPS, the PS5 is said to not be able to run both simultaneously. Players looking for peak performance on the PS5 will see an upscaled 4K resolution and 60FPS.