Assassin’s Creed Shadows Shows Off the Improved Anvil Engine, Shares New Tech Info

Today, Ubisoft shared a new Assassin’s Creed Shadows video to showcase the improvements of the latest Anvil Engine. This is largely what we covered in our Gamescom 2024 article and the recent PC specs reveal, albeit in a video format.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows features dynamic seasons, environmental destruction, dynamic wind and environmental particles, ray traced global illumination and reflections, and Nanite-like virtualized geometry. On PC, players will enjoy uncapped frame rate, Ultra-wide resolution support, dynamic resolution scaling support, an in-game benchmark tool, high customization for both graphics and gameplay, ‘wide support for low and medium end’ configurations, as well as all available upscaling and frame generation technologies. Intel XeSS 2 was singled out as part of Ubisoft’s partnership with Intel for the game, which will be specially optimized for Intel Core Ultra processors.

Ubisoft also answered several technical questions from Reddit fans:

• The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X versions of the game will both have a 4K upscaled, 60 FPS Performance Mode. There was no mention of PS5 Pro enhancements.
• The Selective ray tracing preset will only apply ray traced effects to the Hideouts rather than the open world.
• The new Atmos physics-based weather system lets Ubisoft simulate natural, dynamic cloud formations where transitions between weather states are more fluid. For example, after a storm, clouds dissipate naturally.
• The dynamic weather and seasons can affect stealth. When it’s raining, the sound covers your footsteps so you can move around without being heard as much. It also changes enemy patrols, as the higher classes will seek shelter from the rain. Seasons have an even greater effect, as some bushes/vegetation simply disappear in the winter months. Agriculture changes with the seasons, creating new hiding places, and snow can slow down Naoe, but not Yasuke. Finally, icicles can fall from roofs, creating noise distractions that enemies can actually hear and react to.
• The environmental destructibility has been optimized in the latest Anvil engine by automatically merging objects into a single object as part of the build generation process, which limits CPU processing costs as a single object in the engine represents perhaps a dozen objects in the world. Furthermore, Ubisoft have offset the increased cost in physics simulation by making greater use of the GPU instance renderer, which is the Anvil engine’s state-of-the-art system for offloading objects to the GPU for rendering.
• On PC, the Field of View (FOV) can be tweaked from 85% to 115%. Motion blur can be toggled on and off.
• The game won’t be officially compatible with the Steam Deck, since Valve’s handheld has lower specs than the minimum requirements.
• Assassin’s Creed Shadows supports cross-save and cross-progression.
• The Ubisoft launcher won’t be necessary when purchasing the game on Steam.

Ubisoft also released the official macOS specs.

Pre-orders are open ahead of the new March 20 launch date. Ubisoft has delayed the game twice in an attempt to avoid falling into the same trap of Star Wars Outlaws and other less-than-successful games released recently by the publisher.