A hot potato: Tomorrow sees the launch of another Ubisoft title that promises to make the most of next-gen hardware: Assassin's Creed Valhalla. It's a gorgeous-looking open-world action-adventure, meaning it's bound to be taxing on PC components. But anyone lucky enough to own an RTX 3090 can expect to hit well above 60 fps in 4K at Ultra settings, right? No, apparently not.
The worrying news comes from the GameGPU YouTube channel (via DSOGaming). It appears to show Valhalla running on Nvidia's Ampere flagship paired with a Core i9-10900K. The in-game benchmark has it averaging around 56 fps, though some sections fall as low as 40 fps.
In our review of the RTX 3090, the $1,200 card averages 120 fps across 14 games at 4K/high quality. Even the fairly demanding Horizon Zero Dawn managed 79 fps at 4K/Ultra settings. But it seems that, not for the first time, Ubisoft is releasing a title that will struggle on some PCs. In the company's PC requirements specs for Valhalla, it lists an RTX 2080 Super and Intel i7-8700K for 4K@30fps
Anyone who bought the original Watch Dogs might remember it being almost unplayable on even the beefiest rigs until Ubisoft released several patches, and the latest entry in the franchise---Watch Dogs Legion---is proving to be a nightmare for those looking to hit 60 fps with Ultra settings/high-resolutions, especially with ray tracing enabled. And it's even worse for anyone with an aging processor.
It's possible, of course, that there will be a day-one patch from Ubisoft that improves performance, and we can expect a new driver update from Nvidia to do the same, but the threat of another Ubisoft title that runs like a pig won't help the company's less than stellar reputation in this area.