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Assassin’s Creed Shadows on PS5 Pro Receives Significant Visual Upgrades with Latest Update. A new title update, version 1.0.2, for Assassin’s Creed Shadows introduces key enhancements specifically for the PlayStation 5 Pro, most notably the integration of PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) support and the addition of ray-traced reflections in Balanced mode. This update aims to deliver the definitive console experience for the game, showcasing advanced graphics capabilities.
Advancing Rendering Capabilities
The arrival of new gaming hardware is always met with anticipation from players and excitement from developers. The PS5 Pro is no exception. Upon learning the advanced features of this console, the development team was eager to harness its potential. The enhanced power of the PS5 Pro enables us to maximize our rendering ambitions across all graphics modes: Quality, Balanced, and Performance.
The PS5 Pro offers three primary technological advancements compared to the standard PS5:
- Enhanced GPU performance.
- Advanced ray tracing architecture (BVH8 support).
- PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) technology.
Harnessing GPU and Ray Tracing Improvements
Early in the development of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, a decision was made to revolutionize the lighting system. The team transitioned from a pre-calculated global illumination system with limited in-game adaptability to a real-time, ray-traced system. This shift brings significant graphical improvements and allows for greater world dynamism, as lighting dynamically responds to in-game events. Ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) elevates visual fidelity and reveals subtle yet crucial lighting details. While the standard PS5 facilitated ray tracing at 30 and 40 FPS, achieving a consistent 60 FPS was challenging due to the numerous other GPU-intensive tasks, such as simulations, geometry rendering and shading, character animations, and hair rendering.
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The unveiling of the PS5 Pro presented the opportunity to create the ultimate console iteration of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The PS5 Pro’s faster GPU inherently boosts performance, but the revolutionary aspect is its enhanced ray tracing via BVH8. This technology offers a substantial improvement over BVH4. By implementing BVH8 support on PS5 Pro, GPU operations related to hardware ray tracing have been accelerated by approximately 300%. These critical upgrades – the faster GPU and BVH8 support – enabled the team to target a stable 60 FPS while showcasing the evolved ray-traced lighting engine.
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Global Illumination Explained
In-game rendering, global illumination (GI) describes techniques that simulate light interaction with surfaces in a 3D environment. Beyond direct light sources, GI accounts for indirect lighting, where light bounces off surfaces, contributing to the scene’s overall illumination.
Consider this: a red object placed near a white wall in a lit room will cause a red tint, or “bleed,” onto the adjacent wall.
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Understanding BVH
BVH, or Bounding Volume Hierarchy, is a crucial acceleration structure for hardware ray tracing in 3D graphics. It functions as a hierarchical system of nested boxes. When tracing a ray, the process begins by determining intersections with the largest boxes, then recursively testing smaller boxes, which optimizes ray tracing performance for modern gaming demands.
Typically, BVH4 utilizes four primary boxes, each capable of containing four sub-boxes. BVH8 expands this to eight boxes per level, resulting in faster BVH traversal during ray tracing GPU tasks due to a shallower tree structure, where each node has twice the children.
PS5 Pro Exclusive: Ray Traced Reflections
Achieving ray-traced global illumination at 60 FPS in an open-world game is a significant accomplishment. However, the development team leveraged the additional development time for Assassin’s Creed Shadows to explore further enhancements, confidently implementing ray-traced reflections for the game’s launch.
Ray-traced reflections address many limitations of conventional reflection techniques like Screen Space Local Reflections (SSLR) and cube maps. While some PS5 Pro titles may offer a single 60 FPS mode, the development philosophy for Assassin’s Creed Shadows was to extend the existing PS5 choice of 30, 40, and 60 FPS modes to PS5 Pro, ensuring meaningful upgrades in each mode.
The integration of ray-traced reflections provides a noticeable improvement in photorealistic rendering. This advancement was made possible by the PS5 Pro’s faster GPU and the 300% ray tracing performance boost from BVH8.
Initially, ray-traced reflections were available only in Quality mode. However, with title update 1.0.2, ray-traced reflections are now also enabled in the PS5 Pro Balanced mode, a highly requested enhancement. Balanced mode continues to offer an excellent balance between visual quality and performance for players with compatible displays.
In summary, the PS5 Pro version delivers:
- Ray-traced global illumination in Performance Mode (improving upon pre-calculated global illumination on standard PS5).
- Ray-traced reflections in Quality and Balanced Modes, augmenting the ray-traced global illumination present on standard PS5.
Understanding Reflections
Reflections simulate how light bounces off reflective surfaces like polished metal. While most visible on such surfaces, subtle reflections subtly enhance nearly every pixel on screen, enriching the image’s realism. Common techniques include Screen Space Local Reflections (SSLR) and cube maps. Cube maps, pre-calculated or dynamically rendered, often suffer from latency and lower resolution due to memory and processing limitations. Ray-traced reflections overcome the key limitation of SSLR – its inability to reflect objects outside the screen’s view – and provide superior fidelity compared to cube maps.
Integrating PSSR Technology
Beyond the GPU and ray tracing enhancements, the PS5 Pro incorporates PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, or PSSR. PSSR is an AI-driven upscaling technology. It renders an image at a lower resolution, for example, 1080p, and then upscales it to 2160p, effectively generating three out of every four pixels. Upscaling itself isn’t new; Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA or TAAU) has been utilized for upscaling since Assassin’s Creed Origins. Upscaling offers significant performance benefits: reducing render resolution increases frame rates. The trade-off involves potential compromises in image sharpness and occasional visual artifacts. TAA is an analytical method, grounded in mathematical and statistical principles.
Combining upscaling with Dynamic Resolution Scaling (DRS), a technique adjusting render resolution based on GPU performance, optimizes visual fidelity. DRS lowers pre-upscale resolution in demanding scenes to maintain performance. Without DRS, performance budgets would need to accommodate worst-case scenarios, even if rare. A well-implemented DRS system paired with a robust upscaler yields optimal results: enhanced frame rates and better visual quality.
AI upscalers are generally trained using reference footage at the target resolution. Unlike analytical upscalers, they perform effectively even at lower pre-upscaling resolutions. Their models inherently learn complex patterns difficult or impossible to replicate analytically. The extended development timeline for Assassin’s Creed Shadows afforded valuable time to explore early PSSR implementations in other PS5 Pro enhanced games and to conduct thorough analysis in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. PSSR was found to deliver a superior experience compared to TAA, offering tangible benefits for players. Recognizing this, collaboration with Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) was initiated. Sony provided updated model parameters to refine PSSR implementation in the latest PS5 Pro firmware, which has recently been released. PSSR delivers a more stable image with significantly fewer shimmering artifacts compared to TAA, enhancing overall image quality.
With the firmware now available, official PSSR support is live in Assassin’s Creed Shadows via the latest title update. System-level improvements and in-engine optimizations work seamlessly together. Existing PS5 Pro players can enable PSSR in the video options menu; for new players, PSSR is activated by default. Ongoing commitment to continuous improvement means further refinements to PSSR implementation in future updates as the technology evolves.
Conclusion: The Definitive Console Experience
With ray-traced global illumination now in Performance mode (60 FPS), ray-traced reflections extended to Balanced mode (40 FPS) and Quality Mode (30 FPS), and PSSR available across all modes, the PS5 Pro version of Assassin’s Creed Shadows achieves a new level of visual fidelity. It represents the ultimate console experience, rivaling high-end PC gaming graphics. By fully utilizing the PS5 Pro’s three core technological pillars, the game realizes its technological vision, promising an exciting future for console gaming visuals.
We hope you have enjoyed this technical overview into the development of the PS5 Pro version of Assassin’s Creed.