Conclusion

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is Ubisoft's from-the-ground-up remake of the highly popular Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, released in 2013. Black Flag Resynced has been rebuilt on the modern Anvil engine and expanded with new gameplay mechanics and missions—which is why Ubisoft calls it a "Remake+" rather than a simple remaster. The original is still remembered as one of the best titles in the series, thanks to its open-world Caribbean setting, pirate theme and naval ship combat, so there was a lot riding on getting this right. After spending a good time with the game I'm very happy and can definitely recommend the game—Black Flag Resynced is a fun, polished and thoroughly entertaining game, and I definitely enjoyed it, much more than last year's Assassin's Creed Shadows. The blend of naval battles, ship boarding, open-world exploration and stealth-action is engaging, and the pacing works well, even though some things are a bit more gated now than in the original. Overall, it's an excellent remake—fairly true to the original, but with everything modernized.

The quality-of-life improvements are a welcome touch, though not every change is for the better—you can no longer pick up enemy weapons during combat, which was a fun part of the 2013 game. On the whole, the additions clearly outweigh the omissions, and both returning fans and newcomers should come away happy.

Graphics
Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced runs on the current version of Ubisoft's Anvil engine, the same technology behind Assassin's Creed Shadows. The graphics are excellent and carry the distinctive Anvil-engine look that I've come to like—rich art direction with beautiful lighting and materials. Interestingly, static screenshots don't quite do it justice; the game looks noticeably better in motion during actual gameplay. Cutscenes are very well directed and of high visual quality, though some facial expressions still fall a little short of what the best Unreal Engine 5 titles achieve. The environments in particular stand out, the map designers did a great job combining rich 3D models, with a detailed, entertaining environment and fantastic materials. Also lighting is a work of art, with or without ray tracing—compared to the 2013 original the leap is enormous. The optional hardware ray tracing adds ray-traced global illumination in "Standard" mode and layers ray-traced reflections on top in "Extended" mode, which lifts the lighting and the reflective water surfaces that are so central to the Caribbean setting. In practice the ray tracing can make a surprisingly big difference—mostly because RTGI changes the overall lighting of a scene, which noticeably improves mood and realism. The ray-traced reflections, on the other hand, are rather forgettable, mostly mirror-like reflective pools of water. What I really appreciate is that Ubisoft applies ray tracing across the entire game world, rather than restricting it to a small area as in Assassin's Creed Shadows, where RTGI was limited to your hideout. Whether it's worth the roughly ~25% performance hit comes down to how much you value the improved lighting.

Shader Stutter & Accessibility
Shader compilation runs on the first launch and after a GPU or driver change, but it's quick—only around 15 seconds. After that, I didn't notice any shader or traversal stutter during normal gameplay.

There are several difficulty options to choose from, split into "Combat Difficulty," "Stealth Difficulty," "Naval Combat Difficulty" and "Activities Difficulty", and you can mix-and-match these, so players of all skill levels can enjoy the game—something I always like to see. Additionally, there are presets for color blindness, screen narration, area loot, skip QTE, adjustable camera effects, FOV, and more—very impressive.

Upscaling, Frame Generation
Upscaling support is refreshingly complete, too, and covers all three vendors fully: NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS, each with a native-resolution (DLAA-style) mode. Compared to many recent releases that treat one vendor as a first-class citizen and leave the others behind, this even-handed approach is welcome. There is one notable bug, though: DLSS in "Performance" correctly runs the latest DLSS 4.5 preset (Preset K), but the other modes fall back to the outdated Preset E (DLSS 3), which is clearly unintended. It's surprising that NVIDIA's QA—typically known for catching such issues—missed this. You can use a driver-level override to fix this, until the problem is resolved with a patch. There is also a naming quirk on the Intel side—the in-game XeSS "Quality" step is actually "Ultra Quality," so it performs on par with FSR Quality—somehow that feels more natural to me.

Please note that due to a game bug, the DLSS Balanced setting also sets upscaling to 80% and Performance sets upscaling to 70%. That explains why the performance gain is surprisingly big going from Quality to Balanced/Performance.

Frame generation is available for all three vendors, NVIDIA Multi Frame Generation goes to x6, Intel XeSS Frame Generation to x4, and AMD FSR Frame Generation x2 is supported as well—good job, Ubisoft!

Hardware Requirements
Hardware requirements are pretty reasonable and much lower than recent Unreal Engine 5 titles. For 1080p 60 FPS you'll need a Radeon RX 9060 XT, RTX 5060 Ti, RTX 4070 or faster, and that's without any upscaling or frame generation. Fluid 1440p is possible with RX 7800 XT, RTX 3090 Ti, RTX 5070 and up. 4K60 at native is a different beast though—only the RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 can handle that, but with upscaling and frame generation, and maybe slightly lowered details, a lot of cards will be able to enjoy 4K. Ray tracing comes with a medium-sized performance hit that you can offset with upscaling/frame generation.

Settings Scaling
Settings scaling is good, going from Ultra High to Ultra Low roughly doubles your FPS, and it still looks pretty decent. Additionally, there are handheld presets, which we tested in our handheld performance review that should be out soon. The RT performance hit is 27%, so nothing to complain about, other than maybe give us even lower low options to open the game to even older hardware.

VRAM
VRAM usage is moderate for a 2026 title. Measured on the RTX 5090, Ultra Low allocates about 5 GB at 900p and 6 GB at 4K. Ultra raises that to 8 GB at 900p and 10 GB at 4K; enabling ray tracing ("Extended") at 4K Ultra adds around 300 MB, and stacking DLSS Frame Generation x6 on top peaks at 11.5 GB. Even though these figures sit above 8 GB at Ultra, 8 GB cards cope surprisingly well in our testing—the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8 GB matches its 16 GB sibling, and the Radeon RX 9060 XT 8 GB only slips behind its 16 GB version at 4K with RT (around 9%). A VRAM size of 12 GB gives comfortable headroom at every resolution, and 16 GB or more covers everything, including ray tracing plus frame generation.