You can’t avoid ray tracing in Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Soon, ray tracing will no longer be optional on PC – Assassin’s Creed Shadows proves it
Ray tracing is quickly moving from being an optional feature to a hard requirement for new PC game releases. In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, ray tracing cannot be entirely turned off on PC. If you want to disable ray tracing, the best you can do is activate “Selective Ray Tracing” mode.
AC: Shadows isn’t the first game to make ray tracing a non-optional feature. Last year, ray tracing was required for the PC version of Indiana Jones and The Great Circle. Additionally, DOOM: The Dark Ages requires ray tracing to run on PC. However, it is worth noting that while Assassin’s Creed Shadows uses ray tracing, it doesn’t necessarily need ray tracing hardware to run.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows features Software Ray Tracing
Like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, AC: Shadows features support for Ubisoft’s software ray tracing solution. This allows Ubisoft’s “Selective Ray Tracing” mode to function on GPUs that lack support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Support for this feature is limited to Shadows’ “Hideout” sections and isn’t present within the game’s open world.
In “Selective Ray Tracing” mode, the primary open world of AC: Shadows lacks ray tracing. This allows “competent, yet older,” GPUs to run the game. However, the game’s most advanced graphical features will be limited to gamers who own GPUs with hardware raytracing support.
Hello everyone, following the release of our PC specs for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, we wanted to share additional insight directly from our tech team on the use of raytracing in the game.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows features three distinct raytracing modes on PC:
Selective Raytracing: This mode uses raytracing only within the Hideout portion of the game. The reason behind this, is that the Hideout allows extensive player customization at a level never seen before on Assassin’s Creed. Because of that, we cannot use traditional, pre-calculated, global illumination techniques, and therefore need to adopt a real-time approach with raytracing. In all other gameplay situations, such as in the open world, raytracing will not be used.
However, if your GPU does not support hardware raytracing, such as pre-RTX GPUs, we have developed our own solution to allow competent, yet older, GPUs to run Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The game will use a proprietary software-based raytracing approach developed specifically for that. This was made to ensure Assassin’s Creed Shadows remains accessible to as many players as possible.
Standard Raytracing: This mode uses the hardware raytracing capabilities of the GPU to compute real-time global illumination.
Extended Raytracing: This mode uses the hardware raytracing capabilities of the GPU to compute both real-time global illumination and reflections. This is the most extensive usage of raytracing.
On GPUs that support hardware raytracing, the choice will always be given to the player. It is one of numerous settings available to players to customize their experience on PC.
(Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ PC system requirements – learn more here)
Assassin’s Creed Shadows shows us that PC hardware requirements are changing. More and more games are being built with ray tracing in mind. Now, an increasingly large number of games are launching with ray tracing at its core. While Shadows can technically run on GPUs that lack hardware-accelerated ray tracing support, it was clearly made with ray tracing in mind. Note that only the game’s PC system requirements for 1080p 30 FPS at low settings list GPUs that lack hardware-accelerated ray tracing support.
You can join the discussion on Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ ray tracing modes on the OC3D Forums.
