Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is one of the more interesting PC releases we have tested recently. On the one hand, Ubisoft’s remake of the beloved 2013 pirate adventure is a very attractive open-world game that modernizes the original with a much more advanced rendering pipeline, ray tracing support, upgraded water rendering, strand-based hair, denser assets with virtual geometry support, and a much more modern technical feature set.
On the other hand, this is still a modern Ubisoft Anvil Engine PC game, which means that the visuals-to-performance ratio is not always as strong as we would like it to be. The game can look beautiful, especially with ray-traced global illumination and ray-traced reflections enabled, but GPU performance does not scale as much as expected when lowering many individual graphics settings.
The good news is that Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced feels remarkably smooth in practice. In our testing, frame time consistency was excellent, traversal stutters were basically nonexistent, and we did not notice any shader compilation stutters during gameplay. The game does not have a traditional dedicated Pipeline State Object (PSO)/shader compilation step, but it does appear to compile shaders during the initial boot process when its dedicated shader cache is empty. This worked surprisingly well on our test system.
This guide should hopefully help you strike a better balance between visuals and performance in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced. In it, we will first provide a gameplay and technical overview of the game, then analyze CPU performance, break down the visuals-to-performance profile of each relevant graphics setting, and finally provide you with our ready-to-use optimized graphics settings.
Gameplay And Technical Overviews Of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced
Releasing on July 9, 2026, on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is a full remake of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Rather than turning the game into a modern action RPG, Ubisoft has wisely kept the core identity of the original game intact. This is still an action-adventure pirate game centered around Edward Kenway, naval exploration, stealth, parkour, sword combat, naval battles, treasure hunting, and the perennial Assassin/Templar conflict.
Gameplay-wise, the remake feels very faithful to the original game, but it also introduces enough modern improvements to make it feel less rigid by today’s standards. Combat has been reworked, stealth has been improved, parkour feels smoother, and the game adds new content, new story material, and quality-of-life upgrades. In other words, this is not just the original game with vastly improved graphics, but it also does not abandon what made the original so loved in the first place.
For more info on Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced as a whole, please check out our review of the game from this link.
From a technical standpoint, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced runs on Ubisoft’s latest Anvil Engine technology. The remake supports both hardware and software ray tracing (for global illumination and reflections), micropolygon (virtual geometry) rendering, a new dynamic weather system, High Dynamic Range (HDR), Dolby Atmos, modern temporal upscaling and frame generation technologies, as well as Microsoft DirectStorage for super-fast game asset streaming and decompression.
Visually, the game can look excellent. The Caribbean open world benefits a lot from the upgraded lighting, denser vegetation, improved water rendering, higher-quality physically based rendering (PBR) materials, and richer environmental detail. The ray tracing implementation is also quite impressive, as it includes ray-traced global illumination for diffuse indirect lighting and ray-traced reflections for indirect specular lighting. More importantly, ray tracing does not appear to be outrageously expensive here, which is not something we can say about every modern open-world/AAA game.
However, we would not call Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced one of the most visually groundbreaking games on PC. It looks very good, but it is not as impressive as Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which was already a very strong showcase for Ubisoft’s modern Anvil rendering technology. The remake’s biggest strength is not that it pushes the absolute frontier of PC graphics, but rather that it modernizes a classic open-world game while preserving its identity.
The game’s PC feature set is also very strong. NVIDIA GeForce RTX users get access to DLSS Super Resolution and DLSS Frame Generation/Multi Frame Generation, AMD Radeon users get FSR upscaling and FSR Frame Generation, and Intel Arc users get XeSS Super Resolution and XeSS Frame Generation/Multi Frame Generation (via driver override). This is exactly the kind of GPU vendor-inclusive support we like to see in modern PC games.
The game also supports dynamic resolution scaling, which can be combined with the available temporal anti-aliasing/upscaling options. In our experience, it works well, though players should remember that the higher the framerate target, the harder it becomes for the system to stay locked to that target. This is especially true in modern Anvil Engine games, where internal resolution scaling does not always produce the kind of performance uplift one might expect.
HDR support is also present, and the implementation seems good enough overall. It is not the best HDR presentation we have ever seen, but it is far from broken or unusable.
Finally, load times are blazing fast on our desktop test system, likely helped by the game’s DirectStorage support. Considering the size and seamless nature of the game’s open world, this is absolutely worth praising.
Let’s begin by taking a look at the game’s PC system requirements, courtesy of Ubisoft:
The developer lists four performance targets for Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, ranging from 1080p Low at 30 FPS all the way to 4K Ultra at 60 FPS. Across all tiers, the game requires 16 GB of dual-channel RAM and a 65 GB SSD, which is expected for a modern open-world Anvil Engine title with fast asset streaming and DirectStorage support.
The CPU requirements are fairly reasonable, with Ubisoft targeting chips such as the Ryzen 5 3600, Core i5-10600K, Ryzen 5 5600X, and Core i7-12700K depending on the preset and resolution. This lines up with our own testing, as Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced does not appear to be especially punishing on the CPU. The GPU requirements are much steeper, though, scaling from GTX 1660/RX 5500 XT-class hardware at the low end to RTX 4090/RX 7900 XTX-class hardware for 4K Ultra at 60 FPS, which strongly suggests that the game’s highest graphics settings are primarily GPU-limited.
Test System And Methodology
For our graphics settings comparisons, we used our desktop PC test system with the following relevant specs:
- CPU: Intel Core i7-14700K
- RAM: 32 GB DDR5-7000 CL34
- Storage: 2 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 24 GB
- Operating System: Windows 11 25H2
- All system firmware, BIOS, OS updates, and graphics drivers were fully updated before testing.
All individual graphics settings comparisons were performed at a resolution of 2560x1440 (1440p), using Ubisoft’s proprietary Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) solution at a native rendering resolution. We used the Ultra High graphics preset with Ray Tracing Mode set to Extended as our baseline.
Please be aware that the Ultra High preset does not actually max out every graphics setting. Some settings can be manually pushed beyond what the highest preset configures automatically, so players chasing absolute maximum settings should not assume that selecting Ultra High is enough.
The field of view slider was left at its default 100% value. Sharpening was set to 0%. Motion blur, camera effects, and chromatic aberration were disabled for most graphics settings comparisons so that these fullscreen effects would not interfere with the visual profile of each setting. The only exception was the Post Effects setting, which was tested with the post-processing options enabled in order to properly evaluate its visual and performance impact.
We used CapFrameX and an RTSS-powered overlay to capture, analyze, and display performance metrics such as average FPS, 1% lows, 0.1% lows, GPU usage, VRAM usage, real-time frame rate behavior, and frame time consistency.
Shader Compilation, Stuttering, And Benchmarking Notes
Before moving on to the graphics settings themselves, we should discuss the game’s overall performance behavior, because this is where Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced surprised us in a good way.
The game does not include a traditional dedicated shader compilation step like many Unreal Engine 5 titles. Instead, it appears to compile shaders during the initial boot sequence when its dedicated shader cache is empty. This may sound risky on paper, but in practice, it worked extremely well for us. We did not notice any obvious shader compilation stutters during actual gameplay.
Traversal stutters were also basically nonexistent, which is impressive considering the size and nature of the game. This is a large open-world title with naval gameplay, cities, jungle environments, dense vegetation, lots of NPCs, asset/data streaming, dynamic weather, realistic water rendering, and real-time ray tracing. A lot could have gone wrong here, but the game’s frame pacing is genuinely excellent.
With that said, we did notice some peculiar stutters during enemy takedowns and when shooting enemies. These small hitches happened repeatedly and did not resemble typical shader compilation behavior. They are not frequent enough to ruin the experience, but they are noticeable enough to be worth mentioning.
The in-game benchmark tool is also a welcome addition. More PC games should include dedicated benchmark modes, especially open-world titles where repeatable testing can be difficult. In our experience, the benchmark is fairly representative of real gameplay performance on the GPU side. As always, though, users should still test actual gameplay areas if they want to understand how the game behaves in the scenes they personally care about.
CPU Performance Analysis
Before moving on to the graphics settings deep dive, we performed a CPU-focused benchmark using CapFrameX in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced. For this test, we chose a very demanding area with many NPCs, assets, buildings, props, and data streaming activity. The goal was to find a scene that could stress the CPU as much as reasonably possible.
To reduce the GPU bottleneck, we dropped the resolution to 1280x720 and used DLSS Super Resolution in Performance mode. This shifts as much of the workload away from the GPU as possible, allowing us to better expose the CPU-side performance ceiling.
As we can see from the above results, CPU performance in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is excellent. The average frame rate was above 120 FPS in our demanding test scene, and while the 1% lows and 0.1% lows could still be better, they remained close enough to the average frame rate to provide a very smooth experience overall.
There were some frame time and display time spikes, but they stayed under 20 milliseconds in our testing. On a decent Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) monitor, spikes of this magnitude are somewhat hard to notice, especially when the overall frame pacing is as consistent as it is here.
As such, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced does not appear to be a major CPU problem on modern gaming systems. High-refresh-rate players will still benefit from fast CPUs, strong memory subsystems, and high cache performance, as is usually the case in modern open-world games. However, the main performance limitation here is much more likely to be the GPU, especially when using Ultra High graphics settings, native resolution, and ray tracing.
A Deep Dive Into Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced Graphics Settings
In this section, we will explore the graphics settings in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced via comparison screenshots and videos that should showcase both the visual and performance profiles of each relevant setting. This should allow us to determine which settings are worth keeping at higher values and which ones should be lowered for a better visuals-to-performance balance.
The graphics menu itself is quite decent. It provides detailed descriptions for most graphics settings and includes a VRAM utilization meter, which is always nice to see. The game also offers a large number of graphics settings, meaning that the PC version is highly configurable on paper.
Unfortunately, there are some minor annoyances. There are no live previews for graphics setting changes, many settings require a full game restart (or sometimes just a checkpoint reload) to apply, and the menu does not include enough real-time system information. We would have liked to see the current CPU, GPU, graphics driver version, real-time FPS, frame time, GPU usage, CPU usage, and other useful metrics displayed directly inside the menu.
The game also includes several graphics presets, including three handheld-optimized presets. That is a thoughtful addition, especially given the popularity of devices such as the Steam Deck, ROG Ally, Legion Go, and other handheld PCs. The problem is that the game does not scale as well as the number of presets and settings would suggest. Lowering many options produces only modest performance gains, and the visual differences are often small as well.
Still, there is enough room to optimize the experience, especially if players target the right graphics settings.
Anti-Aliasing, Temporal Upscaling, Frame Generation, And Dynamic Resolution
Before discussing the individual graphics quality settings, we should talk about temporal anti-aliasing/upscaling, frame generation, and dynamic resolution scaling.
Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced supports Ubisoft’s built-in TAA solution, DLSS Super Resolution, FSR upscaling, and XeSS Super Resolution. NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU owners should use DLSS Super Resolution, as it offers the best overall image reconstruction quality on GeForce RTX hardware. AMD Radeon RX 7000 and RX 9000 Series GPU owners should use FSR 4.1/ML Upscaling, while Intel Arc GPU owners should use XeSS Super Resolution. Users on older or non-RTX NVIDIA GPUs should experiment with XeSS Super Resolution and the game’s own TAA solution to see which one provides the better balance between image stability, sharpness, ghosting, and performance.
Frame generation support is also very strong. NVIDIA RTX users should use DLSS Frame Generation or DLSS Multi Frame Generation, depending on their GPU generation. AMD Radeon users and non-RTX NVIDIA users should use FSR Frame Generation. Intel Arc users should use XeSS Frame Generation. And as always, frame generation should not be used as a replacement for acceptable base performance. We would strongly recommend targeting at least a consistent 50-60 FPS before enabling frame generation. Once that baseline is achieved, frame generation can provide a substantial boost to perceived smoothness, especially on high-refresh-rate displays.
Dynamic resolution scaling is also available and can be combined with the game’s temporal upscaling options. This is a very useful feature, especially for players who want to maintain a more stable frame rate target. In our experience, it works well, though players targeting very high frame rates may find that the game struggles to stay locked due to the relatively weak internal resolution scaling behavior we often see in modern Anvil Engine titles.
And with all of that said, let us finally delve into the performance and visuals profiles of each relevant graphics setting that the game has on offer.
Ray Tracing Mode
Ray Tracing Mode toggles between precomputed indirect lighting, ray-traced diffuse global illumination, and ray-traced diffuse global illumination plus ray-traced specular reflections.
This is one of the most important settings in the entire game because it changes the underlying lighting and reflection model rather than simply adjusting a quality level. With ray tracing enabled, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced gains more natural indirect lighting and more complete reflections, both of which can greatly improve the look of many scenes.
The implementation is also surprisingly reasonable from a performance standpoint. In our testing, ray-traced global illumination cost roughly 8-10%, while ray-traced reflections cost roughly 7-8%. For an expansive open-world game, that is a very good result.
The downside is that ray-traced reflections can look somewhat grainy and low-resolution when combined with temporal upscaling, especially at more aggressive upscaling modes. This is exactly where technologies such as DLSS Ray Reconstruction and AMD’s FSR Ray Regeneration could potentially help if Ubisoft ever implements them.
For our optimized RT profile, we recommend keeping Ray Tracing Mode at Extended. For users chasing the highest possible frame rate, the non-RT optimized profile should disable ray tracing entirely.
Recommendation: Extended for capable GPUs / Off for weaker GPUs or high-refresh-rate targets
Ray Tracing Quality
Ray Tracing Quality adjusts the resolution, detail level, and overall quality of the ray tracing effects.
In our testing, Medium provided the best balance. Going higher can improve the cleanliness and precision of ray-traced GI and reflections, but the gains are not large enough to justify the extra GPU cost in an optimized profile. Going lower, meanwhile, can make the ray tracing presentation look noisier and less refined.
Since the ray tracing implementation is already efficient enough to be worth using on strong GPUs, the goal here is not to gut it. Medium keeps the feature visually meaningful while avoiding unnecessary cost.
Recommendation: Medium
BVH Quality
BVH Quality adjusts the quantity of geometry placed into the ray tracing world. In simpler terms, this setting influences how much scene geometry is represented in the Bounding Volume Hierarchy used for ray tracing.
Lowering this setting can reduce the amount of geometry available to ray-traced effects, which may cause missing detail, less accurate occlusion, or less complete reflections in some scenes. Since ray tracing is one of the game’s strongest visual upgrades, we do not recommend reducing BVH Quality too aggressively.
Ultra High is the best option here for the optimized RT profile, given that lower levels did not provide any tangible performance improvements on our test system.
Recommendation: Ultra High
Character Quality
Character Quality adjusts Non-Player Character (NPC) detail, including shadows, mesh complexity, and shading.
This setting matters in towns, cutscenes, stealth sequences, combat encounters, and dense NPC-heavy areas. Lowering it too much can make the world feel less refined, especially because Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced often places Edward around crowds, enemies, pirates, civilians, and story characters.
Very High is the best compromise, given that lower levels did not improve performance meaningfully on our test system.
Recommendation: Very High
Hair Strands
Hair Strands adjusts the quality of strand-based hair rendering.
This is a meaningful visual feature in a remake that places a lot of emphasis on modernized character rendering. Hair can look much more natural than old-school card-based solutions, especially in cutscenes and close-up interactions.
For our optimized graphics settings, we recommend All Characters High, as the lower levels did not significantly increase performance.
Recommendation: All Characters High
Post Effects
Post Effects adjusts the quality of the game’s post-processing effects, including motion blur, camera effects, and chromatic aberration.
This setting is partly subjective. Some players enjoy a more cinematic image with motion blur and lens effects, while others prefer a cleaner presentation with fewer fullscreen effects. For testing most individual graphics settings, we disabled the post-processing effects to make visual comparisons clearer. However, for this setting specifically, we tested with the effects enabled.
For an optimized profile, Very Low is the best recommendation. It provides a cleaner image, avoids unnecessary fullscreen processing, and prevents motion blur, camera effects, and chromatic aberration from interfering with image clarity. Players who prefer a more cinematic look can raise this setting based on preference.
Recommendation: Very Low
Particles Quality
Particles Quality adjusts the fidelity of GPU-accelerated particle effects such as rain, smoke, fire, and debris.
Particles are important in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, especially because the game contains naval combat, storms, explosions, smoke, environmental effects, and weather-driven atmosphere. Lowering particle quality too much can make combat and weather effects look flatter.
Very High is the best compromise. It preserves the intended effects presentation without pushing the setting higher than necessary.
Recommendation: Very High
Water Quality
Water Quality adjusts the quality of water rendering and underwater effects.
This is obviously a very important setting for a pirate game. Water is not just background decoration in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced; it is a central part of the game’s world, navigation, atmosphere, exploration, and naval combat. Lowering water quality too aggressively can hurt the visual identity of the entire game.
High is the best optimized value. It keeps the water looking good during normal gameplay while avoiding the extra cost of the highest values.
Recommendation: High
Texture Resolution Quality
Texture Resolution Quality adjusts the amount of GPU memory allocated to textures.
Thankfully, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is extremely efficient with VRAM. At native 1440p, Very High and Ultra High require about 10 GB of VRAM, while High and below can get away with just 8 GB. That is highly impressive for a modern open-world game with upgraded assets, real-time ray tracing, and dense environments.
If your GPU has 10 GB of VRAM or more, Very High or Ultra High should be fine at native 1440p. If you have an 8 GB GPU, then High is the safer option. Users playing at 4K or with heavy ray tracing/upscaling combinations should monitor VRAM usage carefully, but the game is much less wasteful than many recent PC releases.
Recommendation: Ultra High or Very High for 10+ GB GPUs / High for 8 GB GPUs at 1440p
Loading Distance
Loading Distance adjusts the range at which assets are rendered into the game world, affecting the visibility of distant objects.
In open-world games, draw distance and asset loading range can be extremely expensive because they influence how much of the world the engine has to keep visible, streamed, and rendered. In Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, Medium provides the best balance.
Higher values can slightly improve distant object visibility and world density, but the performance cost is not always worth it. Medium still looks good enough in normal gameplay and helps reduce unnecessary GPU pressure.
Recommendation: Medium
Geometry Quality
Geometry Quality adjusts geometry draw distance, excluding micropolygon geometry.
This setting influences how detailed and stable the world geometry appears at distance. Lowering it too much can introduce more obvious pop-in or reduce the perceived density of the environment.
High is the best compromise. It preserves the game’s upgraded environmental presentation while avoiding the extra cost of pushing geometry draw distance too far.
Recommendation: High
Micropolygon
Micropolygon adjusts the amount of memory allocated to virtual geometry rendering.
This is one of the more important modern rendering settings in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced. The game uses micropolygon rendering to improve environmental detail, and lowering this setting too far can hurt the visual richness of terrain, structures, and dense world assets.
High is the best optimized value. It keeps the virtualized geometry presentation strong while avoiding the extra cost of the highest setting.
Recommendation: High
Screen Space Effects
Screen Space Effects adjusts screen-space lighting effects such as Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) and Screen-Space Reflections (SSR).
Even with ray tracing enabled, screen-space effects can still contribute to the final image. Without ray tracing, they become even more important because they help approximate ambient occlusion and reflections using information already visible on screen.
Medium is the best compromise. It preserves enough screen-space detail to keep the image grounded, while avoiding unnecessary cost. Users playing without ray tracing may want to experiment with higher values if they dislike the reduced richness of the non-RT presentation, but Medium is the best optimized choice.
Recommendation: Medium
Light Source Quality
Light Source Quality adjusts the quality of in-game light sources and influences the overall appearance of lights in dark/night scenes.
This setting can matter in towns, interiors, night scenes, campfires, ship lighting, and other local-light-heavy scenarios during nighttime. However, pushing it too high does not provide enough visual improvement to justify the performance cost in our optimized profile.
Medium is the best option here. It keeps nighttime lighting quality acceptable while freeing up GPU resources for more important settings such as ray tracing, water, shadows, terrain, and geometry.
Recommendation: Medium
Shadow Quality
Shadow Quality adjusts the draw distance and quality of shadows.
Shadows are important to the look of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, especially in jungles, cities, dense vegetation, and strongly lit outdoor scenes. Lowering shadows too aggressively can make the world look flatter and less grounded.
High is the best compromise. It preserves most of the intended shadow presentation while avoiding the higher cost of the Very High and Ultra High settings.
Recommendation: High
Cloud Quality
Cloud Quality adjusts the quality level of clouds.
Clouds matter a lot in this game due to the open-world Caribbean setting, naval gameplay, storms, and dynamic weather. The sky is often visible, and the overall atmosphere benefits from higher-quality cloud rendering.
Ultra High is worth keeping, as lower levels greatly lower the number of clouds in the sky, which in our view also greatly lowers immersion.
Recommendation: Ultra High
Fog Quality
Fog Quality adjusts the quality level of fog and fog effects.
Fog contributes a lot to atmosphere, depth, weather, and environmental mood. In an open-world pirate game with islands, jungles, cities, storms, and ocean traversal, this is not a setting we would gut unless necessary.
High is the best optimized value. It keeps the game’s atmosphere intact while avoiding the cost of the highest setting.
Recommendation: High
Terrain Quality
Terrain Quality adjusts the level of detail in terrain geometry, affecting both rendering distance and tessellation on more refined terrain shapes.
This setting is important because the game’s world includes beaches, islands, jungles, cliffs, towns, and uneven terrain. Lowering it too much can hurt the look of the environment more than the performance gain justifies.
Ultra High is the best recommendation here, as the lower settings did not provide much of a performance improvement in our experience.
Recommendation: Ultra High
Scatter Density
Scatter Density adjusts the level of ground clutter, such as rocks, grass, and small environmental details.
This setting has a somewhat noticeable impact on how dense and natural the world looks. Lowering it too aggressively can make environments feel strangely barren, especially in jungle and island areas.
Very High is the best compromise. It keeps the world looking dense and natural without going all the way to the most expensive Ultra High option.
Recommendation: Very High
Deformation
Deformation controls the level of detail and variety of terrain deformation, affecting the granularity and complexity of the landscape.
This is one of those settings where the visual difference can be subtle during normal gameplay, but the performance cost can still add up. Since deformation is not as central to the overall image as lighting, water, terrain, or shadows, Medium is the best optimized value.
Recommendation: Medium
Terrain Texture Quality
Terrain Texture Quality adjusts the resolution and detail of terrain textures.
Interestingly, this setting does not appear to meaningfully impact VRAM usage in our testing. Because of that, it is not a useful VRAM management lever in the same way as the main Texture Resolution Quality setting.
Medium is the best optimized value. It preserves acceptable terrain texture detail while avoiding unnecessary cost.
Recommendation: Medium
Optimized Graphics Settings For Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced
Based on all of the above testing, these are our optimized graphics settings for Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced:
| Graphics Setting | Optimized RT Profile | Optimized Non-RT Profile |
| Anti-Aliasing / Upscaling | DLSS SR for RTX / FSR for Radeon / XeSS for Arc | DLSS SR for RTX / FSR for Radeon / XeSS for Arc |
| Dynamic Resolution Scaling | Optional | Optional |
| Frame Generation | Optional, with 50-60 FPS baseline | Optional, with 50-60 FPS baseline |
| Raytracing Mode | Extended | Off |
| Raytracing Quality | Medium | N/A |
| BVH Quality | Ultra High | N/A |
| Character Quality | Very High | Very High |
| Hair Strands | All Characters High | All Characters High |
| Post Effects | Very Low | Very Low |
| Particles Quality | Very High | Very High |
| Water Quality | High | High |
| Texture Resolution Quality | Very High/Ultra High for 10+ GB GPUs and High for 8 GB GPUs at native 1440p | Very High/Ultra High for 10+ GB GPUs and High for 8 GB GPUs at native 1440p |
| Loading Distance | Medium | Medium |
| Geometry Quality | High | High |
| Micropolygon | High | High |
| Screen Space Effects | Medium | Medium |
| Light Source Quality | Medium | Medium |
| Shadow Quality | High | High |
| Cloud Quality | Ultra High | Ultra High |
| Fog Quality | High | High |
| Terrain Quality | Ultra High | Ultra High |
| Scatter Density | Very High | Very High |
| Deformation | Medium | Medium |
| Terrain Texture Quality | Medium | Medium |
These settings are designed to preserve most of the game’s intended visual presentation while reducing several expensive or wasteful Ultra High-level settings.
For most high-end GPU users, the optimized RT profile is the best overall way to play Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced. Ray-traced global illumination and ray-traced reflections genuinely improve the look of many scenes, and the performance cost is reasonable by modern open-world game standards.
For mid-range GPU users, high-refresh-rate players, or anyone who dislikes ray-traced reflection noise with temporal upscaling, the optimized non-RT profile is the better choice. It delivers much higher performance while still retaining a strong visual presentation.
As usual, if you still need more performance after applying these optimized settings, the next best step is to lower internal resolution through DLSS Super Resolution, FSR, XeSS, or dynamic resolution scaling rather than destroying the game’s lighting, geometry, water, and terrain quality.
Ultra High Preset With Extended Ray Tracing vs Optimized Graphics Settings
To quantify the benefit of our optimized graphics settings, we compared the Ultra High preset with Extended Ray Tracing against our optimized graphics settings in the same GPU-limited test scene. We tested both the optimized RT profile and the optimized non-RT profile.
The following video showcases our performance testing:
At the end of the benchmark runs in the above video, we obtained the following averaged-out performance metrics:
| Graphics Settings | Average FPS | 1% Low FPS | 0.1% Low FPS |
| Ultra High Preset + Extended Ray Tracing | 77 | 66 | 57 |
| Optimized Graphics Settings + RT | 95 | 81 | 71 |
| Improvement | +24% | +23% | +25% |
| Optimized Graphics Settings Without RT | 113 | 96 | 76 |
| Improvement vs Ultra High + Extended RT | +47% | +45% | +34% |
As we can see from the above results, our optimized RT settings improved average FPS by 24%, 1% lows by 23%, and 0.1% lows by 25%. That is a very solid uplift, especially considering that the game still keeps ray-traced global illumination and ray-traced reflections enabled.
The optimized non-RT profile delivers a much larger improvement, raising average FPS by 47%, 1% lows by 45%, and 0.1% lows by 34%. That is a very meaningful performance gain and should be especially useful for players using mid-range GPUs or high-refresh-rate displays.
The important takeaway here is that the game’s ray tracing is genuinely worth using if your GPU can handle it. This is not one of those PC games where ray tracing only adds a tiny visual improvement at a massive cost. The RTGI and RT reflections implementation can noticeably improve the fidelity of indirect lighting, and the cost is fairly reasonable on modern, hardware ray tracing-capable GPUs.
However, the broader graphics settings scalability is still somewhat disappointing. Many individual settings do not improve performance as much as we would like, and the game’s overall GPU-limited performance is not amazing relative to the visuals being delivered. This is a recurring issue with many modern Anvil Engine games, and Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is no exception.
Final Words
In the end, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is a strong PC release in several important ways. The game looks beautiful, frame time consistency is excellent, shader compilation and traversal stutters are basically absent in our testing, load times are very fast on a modern NVMe SSD, CPU performance is excellent, and the PC version supports a very complete set of modern upscaling and frame generation technologies.
The ray tracing implementation also deserves praise. RTGI and RT reflections can substantially improve the look of many scenes, and the performance cost is much more reasonable than expected for a large open-world game.
That does not mean the PC version is perfect. The visuals-to-performance ratio is not as good as it should be; many graphics settings do not scale well, the graphics menu lacks live previews and real-time system metrics, many setting changes require a full restart, and the game still suffers from some strange stutters during takedowns and shooting. Ray-traced reflections can also look grainy when used with aggressive temporal upscaling, which makes the absence of DLSS Ray Reconstruction or FSR Ray Regeneration unfortunate.
Still, the foundation is very solid. Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is smooth, stable, highly playable, and much easier to recommend than many recent PC releases that look good but suffer from constant shader compilation stutter, traversal hitching, poor CPU performance, or broken frame pacing.
This guide was based on a Ubisoft Connect copy of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced provided by publisher Ubisoft.
About the author: Sebastian Castellanos is a data scientist by education and training. He's also deeply passionate about PC gaming hardware and software. He has recently started writing technical articles and guides on Wccftech about PC hardware, games and mods.
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