Out-of-Box Experience on SteamOS

On SteamOS, things are rather smooth the first time you launch the game, even though Ubisoft Connect is required. We were automatically logged into Ubisoft's game launcher, and we didn't have to wait for shaders to compile since Valve took care of that with a shader pre-cache that's downloaded along with the game.


Once you get in, you're greeted with an immense number of graphical presets, with ten presets to choose from in total: Extreme High, Very High, High, Medium, Low, Very Low, Extreme Low, plus Handheld High, Handheld Medium, and Handheld Low.


After testing the performance, though, we realized that anything above the Handheld Low preset, even when coupled with a healthy dose of upscaling, is too big of a bite for Valve's aging handheld. But hey, at least the game works and runs at playable frame rates, even though the image quality is not great, to say the least.

Out-of-Box Experience on Windows

On Windows, you'll be greeted with a notification that your GPU driver is unsupported when you launch the game on one of AMD's handhelds (even though we downloaded the latest GPU drivers for both the Xbox Ally X and the ROG Ally X). But fret not because you can play the game just fine even with an outdated GPU driver.


Shaders take about a minute to compile on AMD handhelds, while Intel provides precompiled shaders for its handhelds, at least for the Steam version of the game. Note that the game may throw a DX12 error if you first launch it with old drivers, then update them and launch it again. At the moment, the fix is to delete the following folder:

%USERPROFILE%\Documents\Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced\cache.

We encountered this error on the MSI Claw 8 EX because we'd launched the game with an old GPU driver before updating it, but deleting the cache fixed the issue. Other than that, the game didn't throw any errors or exhibit any issues.


Performance-wise, the Xbox Ally X and the ROG Ally X deliver solid performance, but both Intel handhelds underachieve, especially the original Claw 8, which is a tad slower at 25 W than even the ROG Ally X. That's a bummer for Claw 8 owners. The G3 Extreme-powered Claw 8 EX also disappoints a bit, but it still achieves very solid numbers, making it about 20% faster than the Xbox Ally X.


In general, the game performs rather well on every handheld except the Claw 8. It still runs fine on it, but below our expectations. The good news is that you can achieve a steady 40 FPS or higher on every handheld we tested with decent image quality, especially on the Xbox Ally X and the MSI Claw 8 EX, both of which can run the game at 900p/1050p using the Medium preset with maxed-out textures. The latter is even capable of running at 1200p with XeSS set to Quality while offering decent performance (between 35 and 40 FPS, depending on the area). Performance scaling is virtually nonexistent above 25 W on every device we tested, so we recommend playing the game at 25 W unless you really want the extra 1–3 FPS you can gain by increasing the TDP.


While the game supports both FSR and XeSS frame generation, we didn't have a good time using either because frame times are quite uneven with frame generation enabled. This is very noticeable even when playing with a controller despite a decent base frame rate (40 FPS or higher). Now, I'm extremely sensitive to uneven frame pacing, and it costs nothing to try frame generation yourself, so I still recommend giving it a try. Perhaps you won't notice the jittery performance.


Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced isn't very VRAM-hungry, and you'll be able to max out the texture setting even on devices with 8 GB of allocated VRAM. Lastly, regarding controller support, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced plays great on a controller.