After a two-year hiatus at the end of 2017, Ubisoft pleased with another game in the Assassin’s Creed series. The new part sent us into the distant past, being a kind of prologue for the entire series. This is another historical adventure with a beautiful picture and high system requirements. In this article, we will find out which video adapters will provide the best performance in high-quality graphics modes, which accelerators are needed for high WQHD and 4K resolutions.

The story of Assassin’s Creed Origins takes place in ancient Egypt, where the desert is interspersed with mountainous areas and green oases. High draw distance allows you to enjoy beautiful landscapes with rich lighting. The game world is replete with details.

In addition to the screenshots, a short demo in 4K resolution.

Assassin’s Creed Origins runs in DirectX 11. The game is based on the AnvilNext 2.0 engine.

Solutions from the top, middle and budget segments, including new generation models and old video cards, will take part in comparative testing.

NVIDIA’s most powerful solution will be the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

Next comes the ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Advanced edition graphics card, which is identical to other models in this series in terms of frequency characteristics. You will learn more about the cooling and overclocking capabilities of ASUS in the corresponding review.

From AMD’s side, the standard-design Radeon RX Vega 64 will be the top choice.

The full list of participants is as follows:

All video adapters were brought to standard frequencies to match the reference options. The Radeon RX Vega 64 was tested with the stock BIOS in normal balanced mode (default settings). The Radeon R9 270X replaces the predecessor Radeon HD 7870. The participants were tested at nominal and overclocked, an exception was made for the flagship GeForce GTX 1080 Ti — only at standard frequencies. Also, overclocking was not applied to older models in simple smoothing modes.

The test bench configuration is as follows:

• processor: Intel Core i7-6950X (3.0@4.1 GHz);
• cooler: Noctua NH-D15 (two NF-A15 PWM fans, 140 mm, 1300 rpm);
• motherboard: MSI X99S MPower (Intel X99);
• memory: G.Skill F4-3200C14Q-32GTZ (4×8 GB, DDR4-3200, CL14-14-14-35);
• system disk: Kingston SSDNow KC400 (512 GB, SATA 6Gb/s);
• secondary drive: Hitachi HDS721010CLA332 (1 TB, SATA 3Gb/s, 7200 rpm);
• power supply: Seasonic SS-750KM (750 W);
• monitor: ASUS PB278Q (2560×1440, 27″);

• operating system: Windows 10 Pro x64;
• GeForce driver: NVIDIA GeForce 388.71;
• Radeon Driver: AMD Crimson Edition 17.12.2.

For testing, a standard gaming benchmark is used.

5–6 runs were performed on each video card. Results with lags during the test were not taken into account.

The tests were carried out at graphics settings from high to maximum level. Let’s start the comparison with budget video cards in the simplest mode.

The GeForce GTX 1050 Ti has good results, and the lead over the predecessor GeForce GTX 960 is almost 29%. Part of this gap may be due to the amount of memory, in the test scene loaded up to 2.6 GB at high settings. The GeForce GTX 960 can also be played, but without overclocking, the performance is rather weak. The potential of other participants is too low.

Let’s move on to very high quality graphics, adding powerful solutions to the testing list.

The GeForce GTX 1050 Ti maintains good performance and average performance around 40 fps. The gap with the GeForce GTX 960 is widening, obviously due to increased memory requirements, because according to monitoring, about 3.3 GB were already loaded. A comfortable level of performance will be provided by the GeForce GTX 1060 and Radeon RX 580 — the second video adapter is worse, but the difference is not critical. It is worth noting the minimum gap between the GeForce GTX 780 Ti and the Radeon RX 480. The GeForce GTX 1070 Ti unexpectedly looks powerful, overtaking the Radeon RX Vega 64.

Further testing was carried out at maximum settings. Since budget models are too tough for such graphics, they are excluded from this comparison.

The GeForce GTX 1060 retains a lead of about 10% over the Radeon RX 580. Please note that our participants are AMD with 4 GB of VRAM, but this does not yet play the role of a bottleneck, since the benchmark in Ultra mode used up to 4 GB. In the older segment, the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti is still more powerful than the Radeon RX Vega 64, and the difference between them only increases in overclocking.

Let’s evaluate the capabilities of video cards at a resolution of 2560×1440 with Very High settings.

Radeon RX 480/580 are already working at the limit. The GeForce GTX 780 Ti looks weak. The GeForce GTX 1060 has acceptable results, overclocking improves them by 12%. Full comfort will be provided by the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti and Radeon RX Vega 64, the AMD member is now faster. At higher resolutions, the Radeon RX Vega 64 reaches its full potential, and this trend will continue.

Comparison in WQHD mode with Ultra-graphics or in 4K is justified only for top-end video adapters. Therefore, further tests are limited to three accelerators. The flagship GeForce GTX 1080 Ti has only been tested at face value.

The Radeon RX Vega 64 performs better than the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, but not by a significant margin. Both participants allow you to comfortably play at 2560×1440. Only the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti can handle 4K. Moreover, for average performance under 60 fps, even the flagship will need overclocking.

conclusions

Assassin’s Creed Origins is a beautiful, colorful game that requires sufficiently powerful video adapters. It is worth noting the importance of the amount of video memory. For settings above the average level, you need 3-4 GB, for maximum quality at least 4 GB. Among the available solutions, the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti will perform well, with such an accelerator you can play at very high graphics quality. For comfortable performance in Ultra-mode, more powerful models are needed. The GeForce GTX 1060 and Radeon RX 580 can easily cope with this task. The Radeon RX Vega 64 and GeForce GTX 1070 Ti allow you to play normally up to a resolution of 2560×1440. If you decide to aim at 4K, you will need a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

For a small acceleration of a few percent, we can advise you to reduce the anti-aliasing settings to a minimum. This will also make the picture a little clearer, so it will be useful even for those who play on high-end PCs.