Assassin's Creed Shadows: Ubisoft calls out requirements and three raytracing modes

Assassin’s Creed Shadows: Ubisoft calls out requirements and three raytracing modes 82 comments

Ubisoft has a new story trailer, very detailed system requirements for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and an explanation of the different ray tracing modes without the radiation the game doesn’t come with. The adventure of feudal Japan appears after two shifts on March 20, 2025.

Summary :

System requirements in eight times

With the system requirements for the PC version of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Ubisoft describes the performance requirements of the new Open World adventure in a total of eight different profiles and three editions. The duration ranges from the almost nine-year-old GEForce GTX 1070 to the top model RTX 4090. The editor also indicates the frame speed for certain settings and graphics cards.

System requirements for Assassin's Shadows of Belief System requirements for Assassin’s Creed Shadows (Image: Ubisoft)

However, the table does not tell a complete picture as the requirements in all cases fall on dynamic rendering resolution or an increase and Ubisoft does not reveal the profile. What is certain, however, is that in addition to NVIDIA DLSS 3.7 and AMD FSR 3.1, Intel Xess 2 is also supported.

Players can choose between three Raytracing modes

Raytracing is always active in Assassin’s Creed Shadows – at least to a limited extent, depending on the mode. With “Selective Raytracing”, the lowest setting, the rays are only used in the game in the game. Here, however, RayTracing is absolutely necessary, according to Ubisoft, in order to be able to guarantee dynamic global illumination for the extensive character adjustment of the two game figures Yasuke and Naoe. The classic, prepared lighting models were inadequate for this. Ubisoft has developed proprietary software ray tracing especially for this task so that the game always runs with graphics cards that cannot accelerate real-time ray tracing in hardware.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows – The Game World (Image: Ubisoft) Image 1 of 6

There are also two other RT modes to choose from on recent GPUs with Raytracing units. In the standard profile, the global lighting (RTGI) is extended to the entire game world, which, due to the simulated seasons and the geometry of the vegetation, which is therefore constantly changing dynamic light and shadow. With an extended RT profile, rays are also used for reflections.

More features of the PC version

The PC version can also offer HDR support and offers ultra-wide resolutions, for example in the UWQHD 21: 9 format. Ubisoft continues to call a reference in gaming, AMD Eyefinity and Nvidia Surround. There is also a thorough adaptation of the control via keyboard and mouse or controller. An unlimited refresh rate is understandable as a question of course.

An extremely important game for Ubisoft

Originally, the fourteenth part of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series was supposed to appear on November 15, 2024 and therefore approximately two years after the last main game. But at the end of September it was already announced that the nomination was not to be kept and that the shadows would be postponed to February 2025. Pre-orders received their money. Earlier this year, the open world adventure was postponed a second time, this time on March 20, 2025.

For good reason, Ubisoft communicated both times that the developers needed more time for optimizations and final finishing touches. Ubisoft’s latest publications had to listen to criticism in this regard, which contributed to the captured sales figures of Star Wars Outlaws (test). For the already difficult French publisher, it is all the more important before and before negotiations with new investors that Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a success – especially in financial terms.

The consequence is that the title will not only be available upon release on March 20 on PC via Ubisoft Connect and in the Epic Games store, but also on Steam. As usual, Steam only acts as a launcher for the launcher. Shadows also appears for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S | x.