Introduction

The Assassin's Creed franchise has served up fascinating period-specific, historic set-pieces, in addition to the action-adventure gameplay, and the new Assassin's Creed Valhalla takes us to the golden age of Norse Vikings, around the 9th century AD. Assassin's Creed games tend to have such a production focus on history that some of its games have actually been spun off as free educational demos based on ancient Greece and Egypt. The Vikings, on the other hand, weren't particularly known for vast civilizational capital cities.



You play as our protagonist Evior, who is tasked with leading a splinter clan away from the fighting in Norway and to England, where a clash of cultures ensues. You run deadly raids against rival Saxon strongholds for resources to build and improve your settlement. Upon arrival in England, the Vikings are met with resistance from four of the English kingdoms, and much of the game's mission-based quest campaign revolves around the battles and politics involving the four. It wouldn't be an Assassin's Creed without the explorable historic cities of Winchester, London, and York, and vast landscapes of Norway.

Based on the AnvilNext 2 engine by Ubisoft—the same engine that powers "Ghost Recon: Breakpoint," Assassin's Creed Valhalla takes advantage of DirectX 12 and brings the landscapes and cities of the period to life with many high-detail environments paired with crisp textures. In this mini review, we test the performance of Assassin's Creed Valhalla across our selection of graphics cards.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at the "Ultra High" settings profile. The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

• The first screen deals with the typical monitor settings.
• You may adjust the Field of View between 85% and 115%. Note that the default is 100%. So these are not the degrees we are used to, but relative to whatever default they chose. I found the 100% setting to be sufficient, and I usually dial up my FOV a bit.
• The FPS limit defaults to "off", but can be set anywhere between 30 and 90 FPS—no idea why the maximum is 90 and not higher.
• Assassin's Creed Valhalla supports "windowed," "fullscreen," and "borderless."
• Non-16:9 resolutions are supported, too, like our 16:10 2560x1600, Ultra-wide.
• There is no artificial FPS limits, V-Sync can be disabled. There's a third option, "V-Sync Adaptive", which enables V-Sync automatically on high-refresh rates, but disables it on lower FPS to avoid stuttering—nice idea.
• On my system, the resolution scale defaulted to 70%—change this to 100% if the game feels blurry to you. This option will render the game at below native resolution before upscaling it. The HUD always stays at the native resolution. You may also run supersampling; the slider goes up to 200%—the minimum is 50%.

• For graphics quality, there's "Low," "Medium," "High," "Very High," "Ultra High," and "Custom."
• Adaptive Quality lets you select an FPS target (30, 45, or 60), and the game will automagically adjust the details settings to reach that level. Higher values would again be useful.
• Anti-aliasing is only available in "low", "medium", or "high". No "off," and no details on the algorithms used.
• Lots of other settings to fine-tune performance to your hardware
• Motion blur can be set to off