Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will eliminate the series’ largest performance bottleneck on PC

Ubisoft has confirmed that Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will be the first game in the series to support the DirectX 12 API, a move which has allowed the game’s PC version to faster across a wide range of hardware configurations. 

Both Assassin’s Creed Origins and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey were heavily CPU limited on PC, so much so that a steady 60 FPS framerate was extremely difficult to achieve on the platform, even when the game is running on high-end hardware.  

Thanks to DirectX 12, Ubisoft has been able to upgrade Assassin’s Creed’s engine to improve the overall performance and stability of the game while giving the game’s developers more control over memory usage while also increasing CPU parallelism. 

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s engine improvements should allow Assassin’s Creed Valhalla to run at higher framerates on most PC configurations. This upgrade should make 60 FPS framerates much more achievable on modern gaming systems, and potentially make higher framerate targets possible on ultra-high-end gaming PCs. 

Yesterday, Ubisoft released PC system requirements for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s PC version. With this disclosure, Ubisoft confirmed that the game would feature an unlocked framerate, user-definable framerate limits, resolution scaling options, a built-in benchmarking utility, support for ultrawide and multi-monitor screen configurations and over 120 graphics options for PC gamers to tinker with. 

Earlier this year, Ubisoft updated Rainbow Six: Siege to support the Vulkan API, enabling higher framerates across a wide range of system configurations. If Assassin’s Creed’s move to DirectX 12 is as good as Rainbow Six Siege’s move to Vulkan, PC gamers will be in for a treat.