Assassin’s Creed Shadows — out now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Amazon Luna, PC, and MacOS is Ubisoft’s entry into feudal Japan. Published and developed by Ubisoft, Shadows is another addition to the nearly 17-year-old franchise, but with some freshness. The dual-protagonist system with Naoe, a skilled shinobi from Iga and Yasuke, a strong samurai who served Oda Nobunaga — offers a dynamic experience. I say that because both are complete opposites, with their respective storylines adding a touch of finesse.
After facing initial troubles with previous ports, Ubisoft trod lightly when it came to launching Shadows. The game was delayed twice, ultimately making it available for the public on March 20, 2025. And, that was an excellent decision, because the game is smooth, stable, and runs without any performance issues.
That said, with three distinct RTGI (Ray-Traced Global Illumination) modes on PC, the game is essentially forcing ray tracing. This explains the demanding requirement list for achieving a minimum of 1080p 60fps in the beautiful backdrop of Japan. To test exactly this, I have brought AMD’s latest and greatest, Radeon RX 9070XT and Nvidia’s 5070Ti under the same roof — or cabinet if you may.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows PC System Requirements
Ubisoft has shared a rather specific requirements list with a breakdown of the three different ray tracing modes. Assassin’s Creed Shadows welcomes all kinds of upscaling trickery with support for Intel XeSS 2, Nvidia DLSS 4, and AMD FSR 3.1. You can also enable frame generation from the display settings. The game also has support for ultra-wide resolution and offers an in-game benchmark tool, which was previously skipped on Star Wars Outlaws. Speaking of which, big kudos to the developer team at Ubisoft, because this is by far one of the most defined benchmarking tool I have used. Since the requirements list is vast, I’m adding a table for the lowest setting and the highest setting below. For the rest, you can check the attached image.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows PC Minimum Requirements for Low Graphics (1080p at 30fps)
| Processor | Intel Core i7-8700K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 |
| RAM | 16 GB (dual-channel mode) |
| GPU | Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB), Radeon RX 5700 (8GB) or Intel Arc A580 (8GB) (ReBar On) |
| OS | Windows 10, Windows 11 with DirectX 12 |
Assassin’s Creed Shadows PC Minimum Requirements for Ultra Graphics (4K at 60fps)
| Processor | Intel Core i7-13700K or AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D |
| RAM | 16 GB (dual-channel mode) |
| GPU | Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 (16GB) or Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 (24GB) |
| OS | Windows 10, Windows 11 with DirectX 12 |
Our Test Bench
We tested Assassin’s Creed Shadows on the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X which is built on the Zen 5 architecture and comes with 12 cores and 24 threads. The processor has a base clock speed of 4.4GHz and a boost of 5.6GHz. It also gets a 64MB L3 cache and a default TDP of 120W. This chip is cooled using the Antec Vortex 360 AIO.
For this performance piece, the 9900X sits on the MSI X670E Gaming Plus WiFi which has a very unique finish that sets it apart from most of the other boards in the market. It comes with all the bells and whistles like an extended heatsink design, support for DDR5 memory, PCIe 5.0 slot, and a wide array of I/O ports, one of which also includes a USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 Type-C port.
Graphics duties are handled by ASRock Taichi’s AMD Radeon RX 9070XT and Zotac Gaming’s GeForce RTX 5070Ti. Both the GPUs come with a 16GB VRAM, easily catering to the Shadow’s hunger. This is a pattern we noticed during the Star Wars Outlaws performance test.
These were accompanied by Kingston’s Fury Renegade 48GB non-binary RAM sticks running at 5600MT/s. Storage duties were handled by the WD Black SN850X, which is known to be one of the best gaming SSD options in the market. The game was run on the MSI G274F, a 180Hz 1080p gaming monitor. With all that out of the way, let’s get into the business.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows PC Graphics Settings and Features
Shadows offers a wide variety of settings to tweak for optimal performance. While you can of course switch between different graphics presets, the game gives you more granular controls over textures, lighting, geometry, terrain, and more. Moreover, you can also control the character’s quality, hair strand details, cloud quality, and more. For folks delving deeper into these settings, you also get a small and concise explainer on the right side, which is also accompanied by a VRAM counter. Ubisoft has also included a bunch of Accessibility features like Screen Narration, Colorblind options, Conversation Log, and more.
Shadows has support for upscaling trickeries such as Nvidia DLSS 4 — but only if you boot the game from Nvidia’s app. If not, you’ll get native support for DLSS 3.7. Besides this, you get the usual suspects in the form of AMD FSR 3.1 and Intel XeSS. In fact, Ubisoft has directly worked with Intel engineers to provide early access to XeSS 2 and offer the best implementation possible.
Ubisoft’s temporal anti-aliasing has also proved to be quite good, offering almost similar frames in certain scenarios when compared to the rest of the upscaling techniques. You also get frame generation on both Nvidia (provided you are on RTX 40 series) and AMD cards, and you’ll certainly need this if you are looking to play at higher settings.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows Performance on RX 9070XT and RTX 5070Ti
Shadows offers graphics quality ranging from Low, Medium, High, Very High, and Ultra High. The game has been tested across all the above settings, except for low. I used the built-in benchmark tool to assess the performance across both graphic cards. To further check the claims of the benchmark tool, I also played for a couple of hours to see if the benchmark was a proper reflection of the performance, and it was.
All the below tests have been run with RTGI set to ‘Everywhere’. You get two more options, Everywhere + Specular and Hideout Only. With the latter RTGI is only enabled in your hideout area, which means you can gain about 10-11fps more using this setting.
For the RX 9070XT, I’ve opted for FSR and the RTX 5070Ti was set to DLSS in their respective tests. The table below will also give a closer look at the CPU package, GPU memory speed, lowest 0.1%, and 1% fps lows as well.
| Performance on ASRock Taichi AMD Radeon RX 9070XT | ||||||
| Preset | Upscaling and Frame Generation | CPU Package(W) | GPU Memory Speed (MHz) | Average fps | Lowest 1% low fps | Lowest 0.1% low fps |
| Medium | FSR (Balanced) + No | 93W | 3232 | 127 fps | 104 fps | 60 fps |
| High | FSR (Balanced) + No | 85.9W | 3220 | 105 fps | 78 fps | 44 fps |
| Very High | FSR (Balanced) + No | 84.4W | 3200 | 94 fps | 67 fps | 37 fps |
| Ultra High | FSR (Balanced) + No | 87W | 3210 | 79 fps | 57 fps | 31 fps |
| Ultra High | FSR (Balanced) + Yes | 87W | 3230 | 149 fps | 120 fps | 112 fps |
With the newly launched RX 9070XT and a 1080p output, Shadows was able to easily churn out frames above 60 on Very High and Ultra High presets — but with upscaling enabled. If you plan on playing with FSR or DLSS disabled, you’ll probably end up with 62-64fps gameplay on the Ultra High preset.
Unlike Star Wars Outlaws, Shadows does not have any problems with RTGI or frame generation. The game was stable throughout my testing. In fact, the built-in benchmark tool also includes a ‘stutter counter’, which remained at ‘0’ during these tests. While artefacts around upscaling are still visible when enabling FSR and frame generation, it’s not very apparent. This is only prominent when galloping around using your horse. It’s no surprise that Shadows is a GPU-bound game with both the RX 9070XT and RTX 5070Ti used at 98 or 99% across all the presets. The CPU utilisation remained under 30% across all the tests. So, if you plan to buy this game, make sure you can feed its hunger with a good and bulky GPU.
While the game performed well on both the GPUs, it’s worth comparing the lowest 1% fps. With the preset to Very High, the average fps on the 9070XT was around 94 fps, but the lowest 1% dropped to 67 fps, which is a 33% difference. To put this into perspective, the same preset on the 5070Ti caused a difference of 19%. The same difference can be found on the Ultra High preset, but the gap is slightly lower between both GPUs. While these percentage differences won’t be visible in the game, it’s worth noting the difference in performance.
| Performance on Zotac Gaming Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070Ti | |||||||
| Preset | Upscaling and Frame Generation | CPU Package(W) | GPU Memory Speed (MHz) | VRAM Usage | Average fps | Lowest 1% low fps | Lowest 0.1% low fps |
| Medium | DLSS (Balanced) + No | 97W | 2797 | 6GB | 130 fps | 102 fps | 64 fps |
| High | DLSS (Balanced) + No | 87W | 2552 | 6.5GB | 108 fps | 80 fps | 59 fps |
| Very High | DLSS (Balanced) + No | 87W | 2782 | 8.5GB | 97 fps | 77 fps | 65 fps |
| Ultra High | DLSS (Balanced) + No | 88W | 2790 | 9GB | 80 fps | 60 fps | 47 fps |
| Ultra High | DLSS (Balanced) + Yes | 83W | 2525 | 9GB | 137 fps | 114 fps | 112 fps |
The 9070XT ran above the 3000MHz GPU memory speed for all the presets, while the 5070Ti stayed under 2800MHz. CapFrameX did not produce the VRAM usage on the RX 9070XT, so I haven’t included those numbers in the table. That wasn’t the case with the 5070Ti, so you can see that at higher settings, the game can eat up to 9GB out of the 16GB VRAM.
The RX 9070XT and RTX 5070Ti are mostly walking hand-in-hand across all the presets, but with frame generation enabled, the Red team takes a considerable lead. With frame generation enabled, the AMD card benefitted about 61% in comparison to the same preset without frame generation. So, it’s pretty apparent that both the cards benefit from the upscaling trickeries. But, you can still enjoy the game with those disabled on both the RX 9070XT and RTX 5070Ti, provided you are playing at 1080p. At 4K, you are going to need big guns like the RTX 5090 for more headroom.
Having said all that, Shadows is built in a way that even at Medium graphics preset, the game does not lose out on its finesse. The graphics, character models, environment textures and minor details when walking around the land are still maintained well. However, if you disable RTGI Everywhere, these stunning visuals fall flat. Moreover, the jaw movement during dialogues is a little awkward, appearing more like a puppet show from your school days.
Should You Buy Assassin’s Creed Shadows on PC?
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is available in two different editions: Standard – Rs 4,899 and Digital Deluxe Edition — Rs 6,299. The game can be bought from Epic Games, the Ubisoft Connect app, and Steam as well.
It’s without a doubt one of the few games that look really stunning. To further add to its niceties, Shadows is the most stable PC port from Ubisoft in the recent past without any stutters or performance issues. While I still don’t have comments on the storyline of the game, the combat is splendid with excellent attention to detail.
Playing with Naoe is extremely fun purely because of her nimble movements and the ability to scale any wall with ease. If you are a fan of the franchise, Shadows will be fun for you. But, if you are on PC, remember that its a demanding title, and the forced Ray Tracing is partially to be blamed for that.
