If you’re a PC gamer looking forward to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Ubisoft’s upcoming entry in its historical stabby climbing series, then you may be in for a bit of a rough ride, as it looks like even the mighty Nvidia RTX 3090 GPU may struggle to run the game at a solid 60FPS at 4K and Ultra settings.
The rumors come from a YouTube video posted by the GameGPU channel, and reported by the DSO Gaming website, which appears to show Assassin’s Creed Valhalla hitting around 56FPS (frames per second) in the in-game benchmark, with the resolution set to 4K and all graphical effects set to ‘Ultra’.
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While we have no doubt that a large, ambitious, open world game like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla could be rather demanding on your hardware, the fact that the newly-released Nvidia RTX 3090 is apparently struggling to hit 60FPS is a tad concerning, especially because, as the DSO Gaming website points out, in-game the frame rates drop further to around 40FPS in some locations.
The RTX 3090 is Nvidia’s flagship GPU, and with 24GB of GDDR6X memory and an asking price of $1,499 (£1,399, around AU$2,030), it shouldn’t have difficulty running games at full settings – so it’s disappointing to see that it may struggle with the new Assassin’s Creed.
Bad Ubisoft PC port strikes again?
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla looks nice from what we’ve seen, but this is a cross-gen game, which means it’s also coming to the older PS4 and Xbox One, which makes it even more perplexing that the mighty RTX 3090 will have trouble.
If that’s indeed the case, then it could be an indication of a poor PC port – something Ubisoft has a bit of a reputation for. These usually occur when a game is primarily developed for consoles, and is then badly optimised for running on gaming PCs and gaming laptops.
And, if the RTX 3090 can’t run it at these settings, it means people with more modest configurations may struggle to get good frame rates as well, even when playing at lower settings.
So, is all hope lost? Not necessarily. Bear in mind that first of all, these are unconfirmed results using possibly an early build of the game. When the game does release on November 10, it’s likely there will be patches available to improve performance. Nvidia will also likely release a new game ready driver to further boost performance.
We should also be getting our hands on a copy, where we’ll be testing out the game with our own RTX 3090 to see just how well – or not – it performs.
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