Assassin’s Creed Valhalla PC Performance Review and Optimization Guide

Conclusion  

While Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is an incredibly demanding game on PC, it is also clear that Ubisoft has been working hard to address many of the issues that were present within the game’s predecessors.

Now, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla has lost its CPU-limited nature, running well on modern processors with four cores or more. Better still, options like Volumetric Clouds no longer act as a performance hog within the game. In this regard, Valhalla is a lot better optimised than its predecessors, even if the game is still incredibly demanding on modern GPUs.

If you want to scream that this game is “unoptimised”, it must be remembered that Valhalla’s benchmark tests a demanding area within the game, and that average framerates of over 60 FPS within it will deliver 60 FPS framerates within most of the game. While larger dips are possible within some areas, 60 FPS framerates are still achievable on the right hardware.

For those who want an easy avenue to increased performance, please look at pages 6 and 7 of this article, as this will detail the settings which will give you the largest performance gains within Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. In summary, we suggest that gamers keep AA set to Medium or Low, Volumetric Clouds set to High, Shadows set to high, and World Detail set to high. These changes alone should give you a significant performance increase without any major visual downsides.

We have spent a lot of time playing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and we can confidently say that even the game’s Medium preset offers gamers a great visual experience. That said, some of the best game performance can be found by using the high preset with AA lowered to low settings. As detailed on page 7, lowered AA settings has few graphical downsides in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and delivers PC gamers a major performance boost. You’d be foolish not to lower this setting if you needed more performance.

When it comes to VRAM usage, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will run at 4K Ultra settings while using less than 8GB of VRAM in most situations. Valhalla doesn’t need an insanely large frame buffer to run well, and that is great news for Nvidia’s 8GB RTX 3070.

The one thing that we will say about Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is that its PC performance is highly variable on a scene-by-scene basis, a factor which makes Variable Refresh Rate (FreeSync/G-Sync) monitors increasingly attractive. All PC gamers should invest in a good variable refresh rate monitor, as it can help games with hugely variable framerates appear smoother and feel more responsive.

While Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is an incredibly demanding game on PC, using the right settings will reward PC gamers with strong framerates and great visuals. Even Medium settings look great in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, so don’t complain if your system cannot run the game at Ultra.

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