UPDATED 28th Jan 2022: See below.
UPDATED 12th Sept 2020: See below.
UPDATE: I started understanding what the graphics settings are doing by reading this guide. It also pointed out that Volumetric Clouds needs to be turned off.
So after some tuning I decided to publish my settings. At the moment this seems to give the best balance between performance and visual quality on my AMD R9 380 (4 GIG), Intel i5 4690k.
Ignore the in game benchmark as that was when I was in the desert. The most demanding city scenes (at least so far, I’m only a little way into the game) where there are many NPC’s averages around 45 FPS very rarely going below that.
Don’t be afraid to turn down the resolution.
That’s it !
As is usual when using a PC things can get very technical. There are a lot of people who don’t seem to realise this and they end up adding a lot of noise to discussions about PC games that usually end in slagging off the game company for “unoptimised” games and this kind of thing. Go and buy a console ! It will save you endless hours of frustration ! I happen to like the PC, even if it is a bit frustrating sometimes, because it forces me TO THINK. The same has been the case with Origins. I could never really get it to run properly, even though I realised that its supposed to run at 30 fps, I always had this nagging feeling that “there must be some optimisation that I’ve missed”. This turned out to be false. In fact I’d taken the game to a respectable level of performance on my machine and there has been a very good reason why I simply cannot get any more frames per second out of it. This also applies to Odyssey and later AC games (as well as other current games). Origins is designed to run on 8 CPU cores ! Both the PS4 and current Xbox have 8 cores. This is why in Origins I can take many settings down to low, even the resolution, and still not have very much improved performance. After I realised this I could be happy with my 30 fps Origins game ! It runs at 30fps on the consoles as well and I’m not used to that frame rate at all. But realising I could simply not squeeze any more performance out of the game forced me to get used to 30fps and just start enjoying the game (until I update to an 8 core CPU which won’t happen anytime soon).
Now with an AMD RX590, which I was still getting bad performance with, I am back to this. PCGamingWiki suggests to use DXVK. I’d tried this before but for whatever reason it didn’t work. I tried this today and BINGO ! Suddenly Origins is the game I always wished it would be. FPS is between 40 to 55 in the dreaded Alexandria region. Everywhere else is 55 to 60, sometimes down to 43 briefly. But more importantly THE CONTROLS ARE SUDDENLY RESPONSIVE ! Ubi’s appalling DX11 implementation for AMD was sucking all the life out of the CPU ! But DXVK solves all that. BTW if you are using a fresh install be sure to start Origins at least once before installing DXVK or the resolution will be messed up. Cheers !
Also in light of DXVK my observations of comments made previously about ACO “needing 8 cores” appear to be extremely inaccurate to say the least !
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