Assassin’s Creed Shadows releases for PCs on March 19, 2025, and is powered by Ubisoft’s in-house AnvilNext (Anvil) game engine. The game features all of the latest graphical solutions, including support for DLSS and FSR 3.1, and looks to be a visual treat.
The game is also quite scalable in nature, and performs well – for the most part. As such, Assassin’s Creed Shadows can run on a wide variety of PC hardware – ranging from full blown monster PCs to low power handhelds such as the Steam Deck.
Regardless, there do exist a few optimal settings that provide a fine balance between image quality and performance, which can be found discussed below.
Optimized Assassin’s Creed Shadows PC settings
Display
- Post Effects: High
- Water Quality: Medium
- Particle Quality: Medium
Geometry
- Loading Distance: High
- Drawing Distance: High
- Micropolygon: High
- Field of View: 100%
Screen
- Display Mode: Borderless Window
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- VSync: Off
- Resolution: 1920×1080
Upscaler
- Frame rate Limiter: Off
- Frame Rate Target: 60
- Use Dynamic Resolution: On
- Upscaler Type: Automatic
- Upscaler Quality: Quality
Ray Tracing
- Raytraced Global Illumination: Diffuse Hideout Only
- Overall Preset: Medium
- Raytracing Quality: Low
- BVH Quality: Low
Lighting
- Screen Space Effects: Medium
- Light Source Quality: Medium
- Shadow Quality: Medium
Effects
- Post Effects: Low
- Water Quality: Medium
- Particule Quality: Medium
These settings were tested on a relatively modest, mid-range PC equipped with an RTX 4060 for its GPU. The game managed to keep a solid 60+ frames per second with barely any noticeable dips.
It should be noted that raytracing is, in a sense, mandatory for Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The game makes use of both ray traced shadows and reflections, with both software and hardware implementations.
The game uses software based approximations for GPUs without access to ray traced methods, which makes it possible to run on much older systems.
Overall, Shadows seems to be alright in terms of optimization, which is a breath of fresh air.
