Assassin's Creed: D3D 10.1 mode reviewed

As a base for our tests we used a system consisting of an Asus P5N32-E SLI motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor and 2,048 MiB DDR2-800 memory. Since only AMD's HD3000 series and S3's Chrome 430 GT are currently the only graphics cards able to display the shader model 4.1, we used several different graphics cards. Those were: a HD 3870, a HD 3870 X2, a Geforce 8800 GT and two Geforce 8800 GT (overclocked to 670/1,700/970 MHz) running in SLI. Furthermore we used Windows Vista x64 with and without Service Pack 1.

Appearance Contest:



DX 10.1 gives more possibilities to the developers when working with Anti Aliasing. As Rage3D already mentioned, the use of a Radeon HD 3870 and Service Pack 1 improves the visual appearance of Assassin's Creed. If SP1 isn't used, there aren't any differences between the Anti Aliasing capabilities of a Geforce 8800 GT and the HD 3870.



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Performance Contest:
The game looks better when run on a HD 3870 but is it displayed faster too? Is the increased quality resulting in a degraded performance? No. Quite the contrary - if Anti Aliasing is activated, the performance is increasing. The Geforce 8800 GT doesn't mind if it is running with or without SP1.



The Radeon HD 3870 gains a 31.5 percent performance boost from installing Service Pack 1, if the resolution of 1,680 x 1,050 is combined with maximized in-game Anti Aliasing. It reaches 26.7 fps. This is below the Geforce, but the Nvidia card is overclocked and is working with a minor render quality.



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Multi GPU Contest:
As we tested a non-final version of Assassin's Creed we noticed, that multiple GPUs didn't give any benefits. But now with the final version and the current graphics drivers we see a different result. At last two Geforces running in SLI are faster than a single card but only 10 percent, no matter which SLI mode is used.



A HD 3870 X2 is, if the EXE file is renamed to "CoJ_DX10”, able to score a lot better. It runs 26 to 38.8 percent faster compared to an HD 3870 (overclocked to 3870 X2 level). But if the EXE file is not renamed the X2 is even slower than the HD 3870.



This doesn't change the facts, thou, that the HD 3870 X2 is only slightly behind the two Geforce 8800 GTs, when Anti Aliasing is activated. But you have to remember it delivers the better quality.



Conlusion: Assassin's Creed D3D 10.1:
An ingenious observer might conclude that Assassin's Creed could be a game for AMD to show their strength. Since the player gets better quality when using a card from the HD 3000 series. And the working Crossfire support is another big plus.

But: The game is part of Nvidia's "The Way it's meant to be played” campaign. We don't know what the developers made there, thou, but owners of a Geforce SLI duet might expect more than a lousy 10 percent performance boost.

PCGH: Another well advertised PC technology is SLI or Crossfire. As far as overall performance is concerned, can players increase it remarkably by buying a second graphics card? Do you have to add the support for multi GPU setting when developing the PC Version?

Ubisoft: Because of the size of our scenes, our current bottleneck is mostly between the CPU and the graphic card. This means that adding a 2nd card will only give a few percent of performance. The support for SLI/Crossfire has been integrated in the game and as CPUs go faster, the game will be able to take full advantage of this technology.

What is going to happen?
The first patch for Assassin's Creed will remove the SM4.1 support. Developers name a problem within the Post Processing as a reason. This failure is also said to be the reason for the Radeon's performance boost. Ubisoft told us, that the SM4.1 support will be reinstalled with the second patch. We expect further details within this week.


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