Assassin’s Creed Odyssey PC Performance Review
Odyssey – A Master Class in how NOT to make a benchmark
If you are a regular here at OC3D, you will know that Assassin’s Creed: Origins never found its way into our benchmarking suite. There were two reasons for this; first, that the game was hugely CPU limited, making GPU-based testing pointless, and the second is because the game’s benchmark used variable times of day, weather conditions and more, making the tool incredibly inconsistent.
Consistency is everything when benchmarking, as otherwise how are players to know if their graphical/settings tweaks are having the desired impact? It also makes the tool useless for hardware review outlets, who can basically act as a free advertising platform for PC games if they feature an accurate benchmarking tool.
With patch 1.03, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has addressed one of the major annoyances in its benchmarking tool, dynamic weather. At launch, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey could run its benchmark in the rain, during a foggy afternoon or on a clear and sunny day. Yes, time of day remained consistent, but variable weather and cloud cover provided insane levels of run-to-run variance.
Patch 1.03 has prevented the benchmark from running in rainy conditions, but that has not addressed the tool’s underlying inconsistency issues, which ultimately makes the tool useless for benchmarking purposes. Even while fully patched the sky can vary significantly, presenting clear skies and perfect sunshine, the occasional white fluffy cloud, or dark clouds which encompass the entire scene to produce an area that is entirely covered in shadow.
The two screenshots below showcase the game using the same settings over two benchmark runs, one which sits at 25 FPS in this instance while the other sits at 23FPS, a framerate difference of around 8.7%, which is a considerable level of run-to-run variance. This difference was found in patch 1.03, which means that the benchmark is by no means fixed.
What this benchmark does well is it’s simulation of a demanding scene within Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, showcasing how difficult the game is to run at its highest settings. While we have found areas within the game that can hammer processors harder, we are happy with how demanding this benchmarking scene can be, though we are far from satisfied with its consistency.
One thing that is worth noting is that areas like the opening of the game and the opening scene where players assume the role of Alexios or Kassandra on the island of Kephallonia both feature consistent weather conditions, including cloud type. This makes it unclear why Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s benchmark cannot achieve the same feat.
Do not expect to see Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey in any of our GPU reviews, unless these Ubisoft can address their consistency issues, as loading from save files presents the same levels of cloud cover and performance inconsistency. This makes in-game performance testing just as inconsistent as the benchmark, forcing us to take extra measures to provide reliable results in this review.
