There’s a new update out for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla this week and it’s kind of a big deal. The new update brought with it some new performance modes that players can pick and choose from, depending on what they value most in their game.
With Performance mode – which is the default mode on PS5 and Xbox Series X – the game is set to run at 60fps, or as close to it as possible. Before the update, it was pretty much a lock and it was declared the “winner” in a war that exists only in the minds of the petty. But yeah, it did have slightly better performance than its closest rival, the Series X.
But now with the new update, the tables have turned and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is slightly worse off on PS5 now than it was before the update.
But let’s backtrack a little bit. There’s the new Quality mode – the default for Series S – that caps the frame rate at 30fps to push for higher resolutions. So if that’s what you value, the Quality mode is the way for you. If higher frame rates are higher on your priority, then Performance mode is what you’ll want to use.
The YouTube channel VG Tech has done some analysis of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, both before and after the 1.04 update, and using the stats provided, it’s clear that the new update is actually a little worse for the PS5 when playing in the default Performance mode.
Before the update on PS5, the game suffered from a little screen-tearing, but not as much as on Xbox Series X, or the One S and One X, for that matter. From VG Tech’s data from the game pre-patch, out of 30,462 video frames, only 865 were torn, with “torn” meaning those annoying lines that appear during gameplay and cutscenes. On the Series X pre-patch, that number was 4025.
Now, after the update, out of 31675 video frames on PS5, there are 2668 torn frames, which is a massive increase and would explain the sudden worsening of the unwelcome feature. On Series X, things got better with 1107 instances of screen tearing from the same amount of video frames, which is a massive gain against the 4025 pre-patch. Why? Resolution.
For reasons best known only to those at Ubisoft, the PS5’s minimum resolution in Performance mode is higher than on Xbox Series X. The Series X bottoms out at 1080p, while the PS5’s lowest is around 2432×1368. So while you’ll get higher resolutions in Performance mode, you’ll also get more screen tearing and a much lower minimum frame rate of 51 frames per second against the Series X’s minimum of 57 frames per second.
What does this mean, then? Your game is slightly worse off than it was before, and unfortunately, you’re probably going to notice it. Fingers crossed that Ubisoft picks up on this discrepancy and manages to reduce that screen-tearing on PS5, because it really is a minging feature. Though, if you choose to play in Quality mode at 30fps, the screen-tearing is all but eliminated. But at 30fps, it’ll definitely feel like a downgrade.
Source: VG Tech
