Assassin’s Creed Shadows Settings for Low-end PC: RTX 3060, RTX 3060 Ti & RTX 4060

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is off to a medicore start with a ~48K peak concurrent player count on Steam. The weekend should nudge it past 50K, but at least the game is rated “Very Positive” on the platform. In comparison, Valhalla and Mirage are rated “Most Positive.” We covered the game’s graphics settings and their performance/visual impacts in an earlier post. This guide focuses on lower-end hardware including the GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB and the Core i5-12600K.

Windows/System Settings to Optimize

• Enable Resizable BAR.
• Turn on Game Mode.
• Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
• Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
• Disable Memory Integrity. Windows Menu->VBS->Device Security.
• Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
• Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
• Here’s a guide with more detailed instructions.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows PC Specs

Our Test Setup

Assassin’s Creed Shadows: Low-end Benchmarks

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is unplayable on entry-level GPUs without frame generation. Even if you disable ray tracing, and reduce the more taxing settings to high/medium, you’ll experience sub-50 FPS drops. This is especially glaring at night with numerous point sources of light everywhere.

A stable 60 FPS is attainable with DLSS balanced upscaling and FSR 3-based frame generation. We settled with Diffuse RTGI set to high quality. Shadows, Loading Distance, and Light Source Quality were also reduced to high quality. Terrain Quality and Screen Space Effects were lowered a notch.

Barring a traversal-related frame time spike, the frame pacing is consistent with 1% lows of over 45 FPS. These figures represent performance during the most intensive sequences, so expect markedly better performance.

VRAM Usage & CPU Bottlenecks

Assassin’s Creed Shadows uses up to 10 GB of graphics memory at 1080p (Ultra Textures). This is no issue for the RTX 3060 12 GB, but RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 4060 (8 GB) users are advised to drop texture quality to high.

Frame generation eliminates CPU bottlenecks. Of course, it degrades frame pacing and adds its own latency penalty. Ensure that “Low Latency Mode” is enabled in the NVIDIA app.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows: Best Settings for Low-end PC