Introduction

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is Ubisoft's modern reimagining of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, the 2013 pirate-themed game that's one of the most popular and commercially successful games in the entire series—everyone loves pirates. Thirteen years later, Ubisoft has rebuilt the title from the ground up—but this is more than a straightforward remake. Alongside completely overhauled visuals, the devs added new gameplay mechanics and missions, which is why Ubisoft labels it a "Remake+" rather than a simple remaster. You once again step into the boots of Edward Kenway, pirate and Assassin, sailing the golden-age Caribbean in a mix of naval ship combat, open-world exploration, and the typical AC stealth-action gameplay.

Ubisoft has ported the game to the current version of their in-house Anvil engine, the same technology that impressed us in Assassin's Creed Shadows a little over a year ago. As expected, the only rendering API supported is DirectX 12. Unlike AC Shadows, Black Flag Resynced now offers hardware ray tracing across the whole game world, and not just in your "home" area. There are two RT modes: "Standard," which adds ray-traced global illumination (RTGI), and "Extended" also brings in ray-traced reflections—there is no RT for shadows or ambient occlusion, and no full path tracing either. The upscaling support is very complete, everything is supported: NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS are all present, and each vendor also gets frame generation—DLSS MFG up to 6x, FSR FG x2, and XeSS FG up to x4. A native TAA mode is available when upscaling is disabled, ultra-wide 21:9 is supported, and manual sharpening can be dialed in.

This review will evaluate the performance of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced across a wide range of contemporary graphics cards, compare image quality settings, and analyze the game's VRAM usage to provide insight into the hardware requirements needed for an optimal experience.