Assassin’s Creed Shadows ‘Greatly Improved’ On PS5 Pro, Say Experts

In just a few more hours, Assassin’s Creed Shadows finally launches, bringing the long-running Ubisoft franchise to the highly requested historical era of feudal Japan. Like many other games, PS5 Pro users will have access to enhancements only found on the upgraded console. What makes this different than other third-party PS5 releases is that this is arguably one of the best implementations of the console’s tech we’ve seen.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows arguably features the “most transformative PS5 Pro upgrade”

According to Digital Foundry, Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ PS5 Pro enhancements are exceptional, particularly in its performance mode option. This mode on PS5 Pro features ray-traced global illumination (RTGI), which is absent from the base PS5’s performance mode. It substantially improves the look of the entire open world as it features much more realistic lighting than the base PS5’s global illumination solution, which ends up looking flat throughout many scenes in the game.

The caveat to Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ RTGI implementation in PS5 Pro’s performance mode is image quality takes a bit of a hit. In Digital Foundry’s testing, they found that image quality didn’t improve from the base PS5, which hovers around 1080p upscaled to 4K. They also found that the upscaling solution used is not PSSR, as the quirks of the machine learning upscaling tech don’t seem to be present and the image quality for both PS5 and PS5 Pro looks very similar.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ PS5 Pro quality mode has the bonus of ray-traced reflections and better image quality than the performance mode. However, like many quality modes, frame rate takes a hit. Although the quality mode runs at 30 frames per second, it does play at a generally locked frame rate. Both base PS5 and PS5 Pro’s quality modes seem pretty similar, with the Pro having a slightly better image quality than its base counterpart.

“I came away from AC Shadows impressed with the technical package that Ubisoft has assembled,” says Digital Foundry’s Oliver Mackenzie. “There are so many neat technical touches here – from the dynamic wind and particle systems that make the world feel alive, to the Metal Gear Rising style environmental slicing, to the headlining virtualized geometry and RTGI effects. Shadows presents a beautifully realized open world environment that really draws you in, and is up there with the most convincing worlds in video games.”

Assassin’s Creed Shadows launches tomorrow for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. Check out our review to see our thoughts.

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