Even if you’re not planning to get an RTX 5090 any time soon (that $1,999 / £1,939 / AU$4,039 starting price is no joke, after all), you’re probably keen to see if Nvidia’s new flagship gaming GPU can deliver on the 8K promises Team Green has made leading up to its launch. It can also give us a clue about what kind of performance more affordable RTX 50-series GPUs will be capable of.
As I mentioned in my initial 8K tests of the RTX 5090 , early signs are very promising for the 5090 when it comes to 8K performance, mainly thanks to DLSS 4. That is Nvidia’s new and improved upscaling technology, which can help games hit higher frame rates while minimizing the impact on graphic quality. DLSS 4, alongside Multi Frame Generation, really feels like it will be the tech to watch this generation and has the potential to make gaming at 8K a reality.
Best of all, it’s not exclusive to the 5090, so all RTX 50-series cards will get it. And, while the more affordable end of the series will likely still struggle at 8K, it has exciting implications for people gaming at 4K – you may not need to spend a fortune on a premium GPU.
The launch of the RTX 5090 also gave me the opportunity to overhaul our 8K test rig, so I’ve built a new one from scratch with some of the latest components to ensure there are no bottlenecks and to get the most out of the RTX 5090’s potential.
For an extra challenge, I built this super-powerful PC inside a small form factor chassis – and I’ll be detailing my experience building the compact 8K powerhouse in an upcoming article.
Now that the PC is built, I wanted to give it a run for its money by seeing how well (or not) it could run Assassin’s Creed Shadows , which has just been released after several delays, at the ultra-demanding 8K resolution. Could this be the start of a brand new generation of gaming?
(Image credit: Ubisoft)
0 fps?!?
As is usually the way when testing games at 8K, I first wanted to see how the RTX 5090 handled Assassin’s Creed Shadows at the native 8K resolution of 7680 x 4320. As I was feeling confident, I kept all the graphical settings on the Ultra High preset.
That was a mistake; it quickly dawned on me as I went to launch the built-in benchmark. As part of the Assassin’s Creed heritage, loading screens feature a playable character you can make run around until the level loads. It’s been a feature since the first game in 2007, and back then, loading times were loooooong, so it was a nice way to keep players from getting bored while waiting.
These days, load times are thankfully much faster, so you don’t really need this distraction, but as it’s part of the franchise’s DNA, it seems to always be included anyway.
The problem is, at native 8K resolution, the player character in the loading screen becomes ridiculously slow (and it takes a while for it to load), which ends up prolonging the load times. The screen was completely black for a few seconds, and at first, I thought the game had crashed. But slowly – very slowly – the loading screen loaded, and after some more agonizing minutes, the benchmark appeared.
My relief was short-lived, however, as it was clear the 5090 was struggling to run Assassin’s Creed Shadows at 7680 x 4320 with no upscaling. This isn’t surprising, as the game is very graphically ambitious, especially with its use of ray tracing and other lighting effects. However, with frame rates of between 0 and 1fps (frames per second), it was clear that I would not get it running natively.
While not entirely surprising, I have recently played other games at native 8K with both the RTX 5090 and older RTX 4090 that have at least reached double digits, even if they were still a long way off the 60fps I consider a baseline for modern PC games.
Leaving the benchmark was again quite frustraiting, as the whole interface ground to a halt, but I was eventually able to quit, then change the graphic settings to ‘Low’ and turn on DLSS upscaling to ‘Performance’. I was done taking chances.
(Image credit: Ubisoft)
Odd results
By adjusting things to their lowest settings while making the DLSS upscaling tech use a lower starting resolution to maximize performance, I was convinced I’d see a massive performance boost.
Unfortunately, while the game’s performance did increase, and I was able to load up the benchmark more easily, the game still chugged along, often hitting single-figure fps scores and an average fps of just 24, which took me back to the bad old days of when I first started this series of 8K tests with the RTX Titan, when getting a playable 8K experience was a far off dream.
The frame rate was also very erratic, as it sometimes spiked to a playable 80fps with limited lighting effects, then plunging as low as 0fps, all while the RTX 5090 was using 100% of its power, according to the in-game benchmark.
Turning on frame generation, which uses AI to generate and insert a frame between two rendered frames, did nothing to improve the performance.
With the in-game settings making little difference, I quit the game and loaded up the Nvidia app. From here, you can force the new Multi Frame Gen (MFG) feature of the latest RTX 5000 series GPUs, allowing you to use it even with games that don’t support it.
MFG can generate up to three frames and insert them between rendered (some would say ‘real’) frames, and in games like Cyberpunk 2077 , which implements it natively (so you can turn it on in the game’s settings, rather than doing it via the Nvidia app) I’ve seen huge performance boosts.
Could it do the same for Assassin’s Creed Shadows ? I set it to its highest ‘4x’ setting, then relaunched the game.
(Image credit: Ubisoft)
MFG to the rescue!
I’m pleased to say it did indeed make a huge difference. With all the settings kept at their lowest and DLSS on ‘Performance,’ the RTX 5090 was suddenly able to hit 83fps on average – a massive difference and well beyond the 60fps I aim for.
This meant I now had scope to start upping the graphics quality – after all, no one would buy an RTX 5090 for $1,999 / £1,939 / AU$4,039 to then play a game on ‘Low’ settings.
So, I upped the graphics preset to ‘Medium’ and reran the benchmark. And that’s when the results got weird. According to the benchmark, the game again ran at 83fps on average. Increasing the graphic quality seemed to have no impact on performance, while it was clearly visible that the game looked better.
Changing the settings to ‘High,’ which also increased the quality of ray tracing effects, again upped the quality but didn’t impact the performance, hitting 82fps on average. Very strange, as you’d expect the frames per second to decrease as the graphic settings get more taxing.
The same thing happened when upping the settings to ‘Very High’ and then ‘Ultra High,’, with both getting 81fps on average. This was with ray tracing set to only appear in certain indoor locations. With ray tracing setting to ‘Diffuse Everywhere’, which means the effect is used throughout the game world, performance dipped (still using ‘Ultra High’ graphics preset) to 74fps. This was almost a relief because it was behaving more how I expected (an increase in graphical fidelity leading to a drop in performance).
The game looked stunning, with the ray tracing effects making a massive difference to the game’s overall look.
Keeping the settings but changing ray tracing to ‘Diffuse + Specular Everywhere,’ which adds further effects to objects and terrain, reduced the frame rate to 39fps. Playable, sure, but the image quality increase wasn’t worth the performance tradeoff.
I went back to ‘Diffuse Everywhere’ and changed DLSS to ‘Balanced’, so the initial resolution is higher for better graphics but offers limited performance gains. I was hoping to find a sweet spot between performance and graphical fidelity. However, this relatively minor (in my view) tweak made GPU usage spike to 100% again, and fps came to a standstill.
(Image credit: Ubisoft)
Conclusion: A stunning game that’s playable at 8K – but some very odd results
So, in conclusion, the Nvidia RTX 5090 can indeed play Assassin’s Creed Shadows at 8K and a very playable frame rate, but something about the performance just doesn’t add up.
To start, you’ll need to force MFG on and keep DLSS on ‘Performance.’ It looks like any other setting will make the GPU usage hit 100% and slow the game to a crawl.
Looking online, it seems like other people are finding similar results at 4K, with some pointing out that it could be how the game implements ray tracing via rasterization. This means you can, on paper, get ray tracing effects without needing a GPU designed for ray tracing (such as the recent generations of Nvidia GPUs). This, along with the fact that Ubisoft has switched to a new engine for Assassin’s Creed Shadows that doesn’t seem to be all that well optimized, seems to have led to some very strange performance results on PC (we had the latest game ready drivers from Nvidia installed).
Because the game doesn’t natively support MFG, nor does it offer Ray Reconstruction, another new RTX 5000 feature that can help improve ray tracing performance, it feels to me that while you can get Assassin’s Creed Shadows running at 8K, you’re not getting the best possible results yet. Just look at Cyberpunk 2077, which is arguably just as graphically impressive, despite its older age. It supports Nvidia’s new features natively, and the results are incredible (I was hitting 300fps on maxium settings using the same PC).
If Ubisoft and Nvidia continue to work on Assassin’s Creed Shadows to bring those features, we PC gamers should hopefully get a much better gaming experience, be it at 8K or at more modest resolutions.
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