A couple of months back, I was playing Assassin’s Creed and had major performance issues. I wrote a couple of posts about it, and resigned myself to the fact that I had to play with 7 frames per second at best.
To recap, here’s the video from the first time I installed the game, and lowered all settings to LOW (or minimum) in the game:
Here’s another clip, after an “eureka moment” where I increased the graphics settings to “Medium”, ie Graphics Quality 2, Graphics Detail 1. It was better, and the fights were “faster”.
So, after yesterday’s realisation that cleaning out the CPU heatsink and fan helped with Mass Effect, I went back into Assassin’s Creed to see how it fared. When I went in, I was amazed at how much better it had become. I even upped the graphics quality to 3 and detail level to 2.
Remember, all these, on a 5 year old Single Core P4 3.0Ghz.
Yeah you can say it’s very playable now. I only wished I had known or even thought about cleaning out the CPU heatsink and fan 2 months ago. I would have had a much better experience playing Assassin’s Creed. As it is, I spent a large part of yesterday just running around the cities killing guards on the profile that had completed all memory blocks (and hence had all weapons and skills unlocked).
So moral of the story – getting new drivers doesn’t always fix your problems. Cleaning out the CPU heatsink and fan does!
