Hello everyone, following the release of our PC specs for Assassin's Creed Shadows, we wanted to share additional insight directly from our tech team on the use of ray tracing in the game. Assassin's Creed Shadows features three distinct ray tracing modes on PC.

Selective Ray tracing
This mode uses ray tracing only within the Hideout portion of the game. The reason behind this, is that the Hideout allows extensive player customization at a level never seen before on Assassin's Creed. Because of that, we cannot use traditional, pre-calculated, global illumination techniques, and therefore need to adopt a real-time approach with ray tracing. In all other gameplay situations, such as in the open world, ray tracing will not be used.However, if your GPU does not support hardware ray tracing, such as pre-RTX GPUs, we have developed our own solution to allow competent, yet older, GPUs to run Assassin's Creed Shadows. The game will use a proprietary software-based ray tracing approach developed specifically for that. This was made to ensure Assassin's Creed Shadows remains accessible to as many players as possible.

Standard ray tracing
This mode uses the hardware ray tracing capabilities of the GPU to compute real-time global illumination.

Extended ray tracing
This mode uses the hardware ray tracing capabilities of the GPU to compute both real-time global illumination and reflections. This is the most extensive usage of ray tracing.

On GPUs that support hardware ray tracing, the choice will always be given to the player. It is one of numerous settings available to players to customize their experience on PC.

• The AC Team