Assassin's Creed has never been a particularly light series in terms of requirements, though at lower detail settings it was usually playable on a wide selection of hardware. I think part of the problem is the mistaken idea that many gamers have that they should be able to max out most settings on games.

Looking at the comments and reviews makes it abundantly clear that ACU tends to run like a slug on a lot of systems.

Perhaps more telling is that the current average user review at Metacritic is an abysmal 2.1. the last game, Black Flag, has an average score of 84%. That's not particularly good for a series that has otherwise had good reviews – e.g. There's an interesting corollary to the above items that's worth getting out of the way: reviews of Assassin's Creed: Unity have so far been rather lackluster, with an overall average Metacritic score currently sitting at 70%. Finally, and this is not necessarily correlated with the other items in this list, Assassin's Creed: Unity (ACU) is an NVIDIA 'The Way It's Meant To Be Played' title, and it's also one of the notable games for NVIDIA's GameWorks toolset – ACU includes support for HBAO+, TXAA, PCSS, Tessellation (coming in a future patch), and now MFAA (which we looked at yesterday). And it's not just GPUs that get eaten, as CPU power can have a substantial impact as well. It also happens to be a very demanding game to run – at maximum quality, it will basically chew up any GPU you throw at it and spit out crispy bits of silicon. Similar to the last game we looked at, Lords of the Fallen, Assassin's Creed: Unity has had a bit of a rocky start with bugs and other issues needing to be ironed out.

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