It seems that counting teraflops may be a thing of the past. Sony’s “weaker” PS5 console is the place to play Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is you want the best experience. Not only does run smoother with less dropped frames but it suffers from less screen tearing and faster loading times compared to the Xbox Series X. Before we start, catch up on my Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla review here.
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Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla marks the first real cross-console comparison Digital Foundry was able to test. While the game launched on both PS4 and Xbox One, the real question was how did it run across the new consoles. In short, there’s a big difference between the two with the PS5 performing 30% better than the Xbox Series X. In some cases, the PS5 managed to keep up the frames with a 14 FPS advantage over the Xbox Series X.
The Xbox Series X often dropped to 46FPS in some areas with the PS5 maintaining the 60FPS cap. However, Digital Foundry does claim that the game looks identical across both the Xbox Series X and PS5. Both games run at a dynamic 4K dropping to the lowest 1440p resolution at times. The performance difference comes with loading times and frame rate. For example, loading Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla on PS5 took 23;30 seconds to get into the game after loading a save. Xbox Series X took 26:48 and Series S 27:17.
Then there’s the screen treating which I witnessed myself across both consoles. Digital Foundry claims that both consoles do indeed suffer from this issue. However, the PS5 had less of it and managed to recover its frames a lot faster compared to the Xbox Series X. At times, it shot right back up to 60FPS while the Xbox Series X was still struggling to get it stable. There were also a lot of times where the Xbox Series X had 10 seconds of screen tearing with frames dropping below the 50FPS mark. PS5, on the other hand, kept its 60FPS without any screen tearing present during scenes where the Xbox Series X struggled.
Call it poor optimization from Ubisoft’s side or perhaps Microsoft’s CPU is just bottlenecking (which was an issue many believed would happen) but the video below is an interesting one to watch.
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