It's not perfect, but Assassin's Creed Shadows' performance is impressive - it runs smoothly on the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally

Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows appears to run smoothly on the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally
Both devices with adjusted graphics settings maintain an almost stable 30 fps
Frame Generation on the Asus ROG Ally seems to work better on the ROG Ally than the Steam Deck

Ubisoft’s long-awaited next entry to the Assassin’s Creed franchise is almost here, with Assassin’s Creed Shadows launching on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on March 20 – and while it’s a very demanding game even on high-end PC hardware, its performance stability on handheld gaming devices shines through.

Based on several benchmark videos, Assassin’s Creed Shadows manages to maintain a stable 30 fps (frames per second) on low and medium presets across Valve’s Steam Deck and the Asus ROG Ally respectively. This was notable in Santiago Santiago‘s (a tester reputable for benchmarking games on multiple GPUs) Steam Deck tests on YouTube – with ‘RT Everywhere’ enabled (the game’s ray tracing global illumination mode), the frame rate rests at a steady 30 to 32 fps at a 1280×800 resolution, and dynamic TAA between a 19% minimum to 56% maximum.

With ray tracing set to ‘Hideout Only’, similar performance results are evident, with dynamic TAA between 30% and 75%. For a Steam Deck, those are impressive results. However, the only downside is enabling frame generation on Valve’s handheld only pushes the frame rate up to 40 fps but increases input lag significantly.

Fortunately, things fare a little differently with the Asus ROG Ally: Intel‘s XeSS 2.0 can be used on other hardware besides the likes of the MSI Claw 8 AI+, and it works great in Asus’ handheld. It’s worth noting that AC Shadows doesn’t tie frame generation tech with specific upscalers, so it’s possible to use XeSS 2.0 while using AMD’s Frame Generation.

With XeSS 2.0 performance mode enabled at 1080p 30W TDP on the Asus ROG Ally, Shadows again stays steady at 30 fps with some dips down to 29 fps (evident on DeckWizard on YouTube). When enabling frame gen on the medium graphics preset at 720p and with FSR 3.1 performance mode, the Asus ROG Ally X, (via NotAGameAddict on YouTube) 60 fps can be achieved.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows on Steam Deck VERIFIED Day One? – First Impressions – YouTube
Assassin's Creed Shadows on Steam Deck VERIFIED Day One? - First Impressions - YouTube

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Perhaps the delays indicate Ubisoft’s focus on optimization

It’s clear Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows certainly isn’t the best performance-wise: Ubisoft’s new title supposedly struggles to gain above 60 fps at 4K maximum settings with low ray tracing (RT Hideout Only) on an RTX 5090 as reported by DSOGaming. However, slightly lower graphics settings or the use of DLSS 4 should help with improvements (which does sound absurd for an RTX 5090 don’t get me wrong).

On weaker hardware, the game’s performance is good, particularly while using upscaling or frame-gen tech – and while I don’t like the reliance on this from game developers, Shadows seems to utilize this well. Compared to the unacceptable performance of other big AAA releases on PC, this one stands out for good reasons especially since it’s playable on handhelds.

This is a title that has been delayed multiple times – and I’m willing to believe that those delays played a big part in refining any major issues, such as performance. If delays are what it takes from PC game devs to ensure we get well-optimized games, I’ll take it any day of the week – but given the trend of bad PC ports, I doubt that will happen.