Date:
Monday , April 28, 2008
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Assassin's Creed Gameplay Performance and IQ

Assassin’s Creed is the first game to support DirectX 10.1! Is AMD's ATI Radeon HD 3870 series GPU now competitive? It seems that thanks to DX 10.1, yes. But is Ubisoft taking that advantage away from 3800 series card owners?

Introduction

Ubisoft originally published Assassin's Creed for Sony's PlayStation 3 console and Microsoft's Xbox 360 console on November 13, 2007. Several months later, on April 8, 2008, the PC version was released. Console and PC players reacted to the game in a number of ways. Some praised the game as a masterpiece and credit it with singlehandedly saving Ubisoft from a takeover bid by EA games. Some lambasted the game's apparent lack of diversity during gameplay, claiming that every mission was nothing more than a rehash of the mission before it. In either case, the game has undoubtedly been successful, which seems to indicate that at least some players enjoy the game.

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The Game

Assassin's Creed takes place during the Great Crusades, in the year 1191 A.D. It chronicles the activities of an assassin named Altäir by playing back the genetic memories of his modern day descendent, Desmond. Desmond is placed into a machine called the Animus, which taps into and plays back Altäir's memories, which are apparently encoded into Desmond's genetic material. During the course of the game, the player is tasked with the assassination of several key figures in the Knights Templar organization. The assassinations take place in 3 ancient cities: Damascus, Jerusalem, and Acre. During the game's time-frame Damascus is under the control of Salah ad-Din (or Saladin), Jerusalem is as yet independent but has been infiltrated by both forces, and Acre is controlled by King Richard of England. As such, the challenges each city presents will vary according to occupying body.

This is a stealth action game, but it's a little heavier on the action, and a little light on the stealth. Instead of relying on the cover of darkness such as in other stealth games, the hero-assassin Altäir must break line of sight and hide. Often, that involves climbing buildings and leaping from rooftop to rooftop, but that is not necessarily always the case. There are multiple ways to hide, from simply evading your pursuer to blending in with similarly dressed scholars.

The gameplay can be repetitive; if the player does nothing more than is absolutely required to accomplish the mission. However, there is more to the game than that. There are always multiple ways to approach a given assassination in the game. It is ultimately up to the player to decide how to proceed.

The Video Cards

We are testing Assassin's Creed with six different video cards. In the high end, we will be looking at an NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2, a GeForce 9800 GTX, and AMD's ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2. In the more mainstream performance market, we'll be examining performance of the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT, the GeForce 9600 GT, and the ATI Radeon HD 3870. These six video cards provide us with a good cross-section of the video cards our readers have expressed that they are most interested in. These video cards also allow us to expose Assassin's Creed to single and multi-GPU products from both GPU manufacturers.

DirectX 10.1

Assassin's Creed is the first PC game to come out of the box with DirectX 10.1 support, first shown to us by Rage3D.com editor Alex 'Morgoth Bauglir' Voicu. Alex's initial investigation was somewhat cursory, which isn't surprising, considering his article was published a mere 10 days after Assassin's Creed for PC launched. We are going to do a more thorough analysis, and we think you'll be very interested in what we've found concerning performance and image quality, and the fate of DX 10.1 in Assassin’s Creed.