Digital Foundry: Assassin's Creed Shadows - PS5 Pro vs PS5 Review - One Of The Best Upgrades For The System

I’m at GDC this week and all I will say is that what the Pro version looks like at launch is not all that Ubisoft has planned.
What does that even mean and why wouldn't you be able to say more? They had already stated a while back it would have PSSR ...well they failed to do that but the dev has hinted it may still come ...if you truly know something we don't might as well spit it out
 

PicoLordens

Member
XSX/PS5/PS5Pro owners are the real winners here, I haven't played it yet but I might give it a go on balanced mode on the Pro as it looks to offer the cleanest IQ+RTGI.

On the Xbox Series S version, the only thing I have to say is this:

LaCZ3A7.png
Haha. Love it.
 

DenchDeckard

Moderated wildly
I think it will look like a clear difference from the base consoles once it gets pssr. Then we will see a jump in the balanced mode.

Hopefully they can do some patches to get it to 40fps in the camp or add hair to the 60fps mode.
 

viveks86

Member

Tqaulity

Member
But… but you can’t be this vague. It’s… illegal!

What does that even mean and why wouldn't you be able to say more? They had already stated a while back it would have PSSR ...well they failed to do that but the dev has hinted it may still come ...if you truly know something we don't might as well spit it out
I don’t want to say too much because A) I don’t want to expose myself or the individuals i spoke to and B.) The info hasn’t been announced yet and i have an NDA agreement with the team.

Let’s just say that there were plans for PS5 Pro in this title that were changed due to the title delays and some of the public issues with other Pro integrations in the interim. They don’t want to repeat Outlaws and Avatar but it took additional time to implement the lessons learned from those cases and improvements to PSSR. They are paying attention…
 
I don’t want to say too much because A) I don’t want to expose myself or the individuals i spoke to and B.) The info hasn’t been announced yet and i have an NDA agreement with the team.

Let’s just say that there were plans for PS5 Pro in this title that were changed due to the title delays and some of the public issues with other Pro integrations in the interim. They don’t want to repeat Outlaws and Avatar but it took additional time to implement the lessons learned from those cases and improvements to PSSR. They are paying attention…
Hmm ...thanks ...its just weird and concerning that those "implementations" aren't there for launch after already having a 3.5 month delay

I hope they still have plans to implement this stuff
 

evanft

Member
I don’t want to say too much because A) I don’t want to expose myself or the individuals i spoke to and B.) The info hasn’t been announced yet and i have an NDA agreement with the team.

Let’s just say that there were plans for PS5 Pro in this title that were changed due to the title delays and some of the public issues with other Pro integrations in the interim. They don’t want to repeat Outlaws and Avatar but it took additional time to implement the lessons learned from those cases and improvements to PSSR. They are paying attention…
Bro acting like he's got some super secret special info that people are protecting with their life.

The game will get further enhancements on PS5 Pro, possibly with PSSR included in that. That's not a big deal at all.
 
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Thanks for sharing this additional context. With this frame of reference you need a damn 5080 or better for 60fps at 1080, a graphics card that costs more alone than the console itself. Not a bad value proposition with the pro.
Keep in mind these are maxed out ultra settings. Very high settings boost framerate by 20fps, DLSS can double the framerate, and there's also DLSS FG. The RTX5080 can achieve around 60fps with 4K DLSS balance (comparable image quality than native 4K TAA, if not better thanks to transformer model) and there's also FG, so the game will run over 120fps.
 

kevboard

Member
Thanks for sharing this additional context. With this frame of reference you need a damn 5080 or better for 60fps at 1080, a graphics card that costs more alone than the console itself. Not a bad value proposition with the pro.

no you don't. max settings on PC are nonsense that noone in their right mind would use.
consoles probably run a mix of low and medium settings (that's the norm), so with matched settings you will get 1080p 60fps probably on every mid range card from the 3070 upwards.
 

Seomel

Member
Interesting reply about pssr. Wonder if its going to be option soon

What’s troubling is how little effort went into the baked lighting. That’s why the difference stands out, a delta between shit and acceptable will always be large.

There were no such issues in prior AC games when effort was spent on the lighting.
How are you gonna do baked lighting for open world game with dynamic seasons and day/night cicle? It doesnt make sense
 

yamaci17

Member
no you don't. max settings on PC are nonsense that noone in their right mind would use.
consoles probably run a mix of low and medium settings (that's the norm), so with matched settings you will get 1080p 60fps probably on every mid range card from the 3070 upwards.
now I see, from these people comes the "you need 5090 to enjoy gaming!11" logic
next up we will see someone saying "hey look 6090 gets 45 FPS at cyberpunk with 4k native path tracing" and someone will go, "thankfully my ps5 can do 60 FPS in that game. phew, can't imagine being a PC gamer, keep waiting for that 7090 to finally get that 60 FPS we've been getting all this time!"
 
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HeWhoWalks

Gold Member
I still think it's underwhelming. I have the PS5 Pro, I don't think it's really worth the upgrade. Really wish it had a GPU upgrade as well.
The Pro’s upgrade is the graphics card…

I think you meant CPU.
It's ok bro, me and adamsapple adamsapple will be playing on the series x with superior draw distance on a console that cost half the price of your incredible pro console. We can even rent the game while you will need to buy a disk drive to rent it ;)

Dj Khaled Mtv Emas GIF by 2020 MTV EMA
I see. Balance emotional trolling with more emotional trolling… 💩
 
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I still think it's underwhelming. I have the PS5 Pro, I don't think it's really worth the upgrade. Really wish it had a GPU upgrade as well.
It is underwhelming man. I knew the fanboys would be running with the narrative that this is some "great" Pro patch after DF's thread title. Great would've been 1080p upscaled to 4k with PSSR with rtgi. Great would've been Balanced and Quality getting extra bells and whistles that the PC version has. The fact that it doesn't even have PSSR at launch should've stopped DF from putting their stamp of approval on it, let alone declaring it "one of the biggest upgrades yet". Oliver is too much of a shill and since he's the new guy he's especially soft on devs. It's much easier to be positive than negative due to how famboys react.

The Pro just keeps failing to deliver a true PC-like experience. Or rather forget about PC, it doesn't deliver a high end console experience but rather a slightly improved one over base PS5. For $800 we should've been getting something along the lines of a 3080 or 3080ti, considering those cards are old now and Sony should be getting parts cheaper to build this console. 1080p is unacceptable in this era of 4k tvs on the Pro. This game is only a big upgrade in Performance mode due to one setting...rtgi...there are a whole lot of other settings that on a PC like the 3080/3080ti are running much higher than Pro i bet.

Ubi had 3.5 extra months to polish this game and deliver the first true Pro showcase game.
 
no you don't. max settings on PC are nonsense that noone in their right mind would use.
consoles probably run a mix of low and medium settings (that's the norm), so with matched settings you will get 1080p 60fps probably on every mid range card from the 3070 upwards.
The RTX3070ti has around 50-60fps at 1440p + DLSSQuality with medium settings and RT GI everywhere.



Edit - This video has 1080p gameplay without DLSS, around 55-60fps with medium settings and RT GI limited just to hideout.

 
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yamaci17

Member
See? 3070ti beating the piss out of the Pro i knew it
doesn't matter much, 1440p dlss performance would probably give you MUCH better image quality than whatever ps5 pro is doing with taau or pssr
with that performance overhead dlss gives you, you can enjoy high framerate, higher quality ray tracing options and that hair quality setting or whatever
not to mention using reflex on PC, you will have %50-60 less latency (equivalent to having 1.5x more FPS in most cases) compared to 60 fps vsync mode on Pro. so even if you were getting 40-45 FPS at any given settings (higher than pro, for example), you will still have the same responsiveness of the console version running at vsync 60 FPS

this is something that is largely being overlooked for some reason. PC and consoles don't have the same responsiveness/latency at same framerates due to NVIDIA reflex. this is HUGE. unless consoles get parity with nvidia reflex, the experience you get at the same framerate are not equivalent on consoles and PC. I get 60 ms latency at 40 FPS GPU bound with reflex, and most 60 fps vsync console games have more than 100 ms latency.
 
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kevboard

Member
now I see, from these people comes the "you need 5090 to enjoy gaming!11" logic
next up we will see someone saying "hey look 6090 gets 45 FPS at cyberpunk with 4k native path tracing" and someone will go, "thankfully my ps5 can do 60 FPS in that game. phew, can't imagine being a PC gamer, keep waiting for that 7090 to finally get that 60 FPS we've been getting all this time!"

I mean that unironically happened with the 5090.
Nvidia showed Cyberpunk run native 4K completely maxed settings and maxed path tracing, and people were shocked it only ran at ~20 FPS, while ignoring how absolutely insane these settings are.
 

kevboard

Member
But it doesn’t? 960p base resolution and it’s almost always below 60fps whereas the Pro is almost locked.

I wouldn’t use that as evidence the 3070 Ti is better, especially if those 8GB don’t hold up.

until we know the settings the console versions use, it's all pure speculation. maybe Digit Foundry's PC video on the game will list them
 
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Gaiff

SBI’s Resident Gaslighter
until we know the settings the console versions use, it's all pure speculation. maybe Digit Foundry's PC video on the game will list them
Yeah, pretty much. NVIDIA cards also suffer a pretty heavy performance penalty on the Anvil engine too. The 7900 XTX is almost as fast as the 4090 when the latter is generally around 20% faster, so the 3070 Ti beating the Pro would surprise me very much.
 

yamaci17

Member
Yeah, pretty much. NVIDIA cards also suffer a pretty heavy performance penalty on the Anvil engine too. The 7900 XTX is almost as fast as the 4090 when the latter is generally around 20% faster, so the 3070 Ti beating the Pro would surprise me very much.
3070ti wont beat a ps5 pro and should consider itself lucky if it can match base ps5 or just be above it with the performance overheads the PC ports generally have

but settings can still be adjusted to make the OVERALL experience better on a 3070ti (and VRAM would hold up because all ubisoft games have competent texture streaming). reflex, dlss transformer having much better image quality at a lower internal resolution and so on

that is ultimately what matters imo
 

kevboard

Member
Yeah, pretty much. NVIDIA cards also suffer a pretty heavy performance penalty on the Anvil engine too. The 7900 XTX is almost as fast as the 4090 when the latter is generally around 20% faster, so the 3070 Ti beating the Pro would surprise me very much.

with raytracing? that's indeed very weird if true.

I wouldn't be surprised if this game is another one where the consoles use below PC's lowest RT settings in some form.
Watch Dogs Legion did that, Alan Wake 2 does it, Indiana Jones does it... it's pretty common... and annoying, because why not give PC players access to these? 😑😑
 
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oh, the big upgrade is in performance mode whick looks a blurry mess...

i cant believe how shit the RT Reflection implementation is, they may aswell have kept that off and improve something else
You said it better than me ....why is this a success to people when it's so low resolution ...on the Pro ...like come on people now we're accepting 1080p as something to strive for? It's not like us console people are playing on small monitor either. 1080p looks like shit on a 55 inch or greater TV. This has been known for ages and was one of THE biggest issues this gen ...remember Evil West? Dying Light 2's quality mode? We should all be pissed at Ubi for not getting PSSR working AT LAUNCH and Sony for not insuring that all devs are able to utilize it at a lower cost.

Cerny f'd up with this machine man
 
3070ti wont beat a ps5 pro and should consider itself lucky if it can match base ps5 or just be above it with the performance overheads the PC ports generally have

but settings can still be adjusted to make the OVERALL experience better on a 3070ti (and VRAM would hold up because all ubisoft games have competent texture streaming). reflex, dlss transformer having much better image quality at a lower internal resolution and so on

that is ultimately what matters imo
Exactly dude I'm not talking framerates only but a variety of settings and factors that make the 3070ti beat this games Pro implementations ass....dlss, higher general settings, reflex etc
 

Shmunter

Member
Interesting reply about pssr. Wonder if its going to be option soon


How are you gonna do baked lighting for open world game with dynamic seasons and day/night cicle? It doesnt make sense

You bake it and blend it. You think the Is is the first game to be open world with different times of day and weather??
 
You bake it and blend it. You think the Is is the first game to be open world with different times of day and weather??
That never looked more than "acceptable".
Even a game with a budget as massive as HFW couldn`t do that well with glow in the dark AO-less objects pretty much everywhere without direct light.
I don`t see Shadows being worse than that.
 
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ManaByte

Banned
I've played it in Balanced on XSX and Performance on Pro.

The RT reflections aren't worth it on the Pro in Balanced.

RTGI is the game changer here and Balanced on XSX has it and it's 60 on the Pro in Performance.

If you don't have a Pro and have a VRR TV, Balanced is really good on the XSX. The VRR smooths out any drops and the 40fps is really good.

Haven't tried Balanced on the base PS5 yet because my base PS5 isn't hooked up to a 120hz VRR TV, just my Pro and XSX are.
 
Yeah, pretty much. NVIDIA cards also suffer a pretty heavy performance penalty on the Anvil engine too. The 7900 XTX is almost as fast as the 4090 when the latter is generally around 20% faster, so the 3070 Ti beating the Pro would surprise me very much.
The RTX4090 is on average 29% faster than the 7900XTX, so if AMD card can match the 4090 it tells us how much worse the game runs on nvidia hardware. Maybe nvidia will work with ubisoft to improve performance.


But AMD is killing lately nvidia when it comes to drivers optimizations. They released driver for monster hunter wilds that boosted performance by 25%, while nvidia game ready drivers for this game didnt improved framerate at all.

That being said I saw AC:Shadows gameplays on the RTX4080 and the game still looked perfectly playable with maxed out settongs at 4K DLSS balance (50/60) with DLSS FGx2 on top of tha 100fps, so even though the game favors AMD hardware it still can be played on nvidia GPUs. I dont mind 100fps :p.
 
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Shmunter

Member
That never looked more than "acceptable".
Even a game with a budget as massive as HFW couldn`t do that well with glow in the dark AO-less objects pretty much everywhere without direct light.
I don`t see Shadows being worse than that.
All games looked like shit before AC Shadows Pro mode ladies and gentlemen
 

Seomel

Member
You bake it and blend it. You think the Is is the first game to be open world with different times of day and weather??
On top of day and nightcycle? Do you know how insane that sounds. If you have something like last of us its one thing, but not with systems ac shadows have.
 

ChiefDada

Member
Wow, the baked lighting looks like shit in this game. That stands out more in a negative way than the RTGI does in a positive way (although it does look good).

Every game with baked GI would suddenly look like shit with an RTGI side by side comparison. That is why I chuckle when people say graphics have peaked. A game like Horizon Forbidden West, for all the mostly deserved praise it gets for its visuals, looks insanely dated next to AC Shadows and it comes down to the lighting of course. Seeing such large a generational difference from a mid gen console is striking.

Sony is going to make a killing with it's PS6 remakes/remasters simply by implementing full ray tracing and likely some path tracing to their legacy titles because it is that transformative.
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
Every game with baked GI would suddenly look like shit with an RTGI side by side comparison. That is why I chuckle when people say graphics have peaked. A game like Horizon Forbidden West, for all the mostly deserved praise it gets for its visuals, looks insanely dated next to AC Shadows and it comes down to the lighting of course. Seeing such large a generational difference from a mid gen console is striking.

Sony is going to make a killing with it's PS6 remakes/remasters simply by implementing full ray tracing and likely some path tracing to their legacy titles because it is that transformative.

There are a lot of games with baked GI that don't look as flat and lifeless as this.
 
I've played it in Balanced on XSX and Performance on Pro.

The RT reflections aren't worth it on the Pro in Balanced.

RTGI is the game changer here and Balanced on XSX has it and it's 60 on the Pro in Performance.

If you don't have a Pro and have a VRR TV, Balanced is really good on the XSX. The VRR smooths out any drops and the 40fps is really good.

Haven't tried Balanced on the base PS5 yet because my base PS5 isn't hooked up to a 120hz VRR TV, just my Pro and XSX are.
There are no RT reflections in Balanced on Pro. Only in quality at 30fps. This is disappointing IMO.

Paradoxically the best mode on base PS5/XSX is at 40fps with a 120hz screen, and at 60fps on Pro with a 60hz screen. This is quite an odd predicament.
 
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