Yeah I know, I can’t help myself. I just really had to go get Assassin’s Creed, even though I know full well it probably won’t run very well on my 5 year old gaming rig.
Now, remember that I was saying that Crysis is a very demanding game? Well, I take it back.
Update – I figured out why I was getting crappy performance . I had set the graphics options TOO LOW. I bumped the graphics up abit and the game suddenly became playable. My new entry explains why.
Assassin’s Creed takes the cake in “demanding”. Compared to Asassin’s Creed, Crysis actually ran pretty smooth for the most part on my PC, except for the irritating and incessant crashing to desktop. Asasssin’s Creed, however, is very stable. After being on it for so many hours (14 hours according to Xfire), it only crashed on me once. Yes, ONCE.
However, Assassin’s Creed makes my CPU beg for mercy. I have set the CPU temperature warning to a pretty high figure, and under Assassin’s Creed, my CPU temperature warning beep sounded. I was actually surprised to hear a new sound coming from my PC when I first heard it. I have never heard this sound before, and it’s not the usual “beep” sounds to indicate something is wrong. After I ran a temperature monitoring software and then checked my BIOS, did I realise that Assassin’s Creed really, REALLY made my PC cry.
Minimum spec according to the detection software that came with the game:
P4 1.9Ghz
1GB RAM
nVidia 68xx series with 256MB VRAM
What I have:
P4 3.0Ghz Hyper Threading
2GB RAM
nVidia 7600GT AGP with 256MB VRAM
As you can see, my rig, while it might be 5 years old, still isn’t “minimum spec” yet. Thus I happily installed the game. I was happy that the game auto-detected my settings at “medium” and set the resolution for 1280×1024, ie the maximum my monitor can go. Normally games tend to under-detect rather than over-detect, ie they normally set the settings to be under what your PC can actually handle. Normally I’d go in and adjust the settings manually after detection, to see just how far I can tweak it without the game bogging down.
Watch the video. Then you tell me if I should cry too.
After an initial run-through, I went back into the settings and set everything down to LOW. I lowered the resolution down to 800×600 too, but I found very little difference in performance if I were to set it higher to 1024×768.
Framerates were always under 10. Usually 3 or 5. When the scene shows more than 5 or 6 human figures, framerates dropped to zero. Yes, ZERO. FRAPS showed a big fat 0 on the screen. Actually it is not zero, but it becomes a slideshow. The next frame comes up every 2 seconds or so, so framerates technically should be between 0.2 to 0.5.
And, when framerates dropped to 0, the sound started to stutter. And I really mean stutter. If a character was saying “Hello there”, what I hear during zero framerates is something like “Hell.. hell.. hell… hell…. ello… ello… ello… lo th… lo th… lo th… ther… ther…. ther…. there… there….”
Well you get the picture.
The only good thing about having low framerates in this game is during fights – I can actually see which bad guy is starting to attack me and I have 3 seconds (between frame updates) to turn Altair (the main character, pronounced as “ohl-tah-ir” by other characters in-game) around to meet the adversary. Thus, while fights might be in “slow-motion” it gives me time to see the situation and act accordingly. Hence, Altair hasn’t lost a fight yet, and hardly ever gets hit 🙂
I went online to various websites, and it seemed the consensus is that Assassin’s Creed really needs a dual-core PC at minimum to run anywhere near “smooth”. So I guess that’s why my single-core, P4 3.0Ghz still couldn’t cut it even though it’s not minimum spec.
Guess I need to really get a whole new PC sometime pretty soon… as soon as I get a job, that is.
