Ubisoft's open-world Assassin's Creed series is like no other in terms of how it can bring gaming PCs to their knees, and Assassin's Creed Odyssey is no different. A little bit of fiddling will be required to achieve optimum PC performance in AC Odyssey, but hopefully, this handy little Assassin's Creed Odyssey PC performance guide can help you hit the sweet spot between graphics and performance.

Using the chart below you can find out just how demanding each graphics setting is in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Along with this, we've given priority scores based on how important we believe it is to enable these graphics options for the optimum PC gaming experience with ACO.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey System Requirements

For the benchmark results below we used a GeForce GTX 1060 6GB, an Intel Core i7-5820K processor, and 16GB DDR4 memory.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey Graphics Options Performance Breakdown

The further right the bar goes, the more demanding the graphics option is.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey Graphics Settings

Antialiasing

A technology used to soften the edges of objects on Assassin's Creed Odyssey. This lends a great deal to image quality in ACO and should be turned up as high as you can manage. However, the higher your resolution, the less the importance of this particular graphics setting.

Performance Impact - 2/5

Priority - 5/5

Shadows

The Shadows setting affects filter, distance, and shadow map applied to display shadows. This option can have a large impact on GPU performance in AC Odyssey.

Performance Impact - 4/5

Priority - 4/5

Environment Details

Adjust graphical complexity on environmental elements in Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

Performance Impact - 0/5

Priority - 3/5

Texture Detail

Use texture quality for more detailed textures, or lower texture quality to increase performance. This setting is almost exclusively reliant on the amount of VRAM on your graphics card. Find the maximum Texture Detail setting your GPU can handle in ACO and stick to it, as provided you have enough video memory there will be little to no impact on performance.

Performance Impact - 3/5

Priority - /5

Terrain

Terrain adjusts the detail level of terrain in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. In truth, you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the Medium and High settings available. We detected no performance cost, however, so feel free to turn it up at the expensive of a few megabytes of VRAM.

Performance Impact - 0/5

Priority - 2/5

Clutter

Affects the amount of clutter and debris that litters the terrain in AC Odyssey, such as grass and branches. It's a cheap video setting but it does add a great deal to the density and believability of environments. 

Performance Impact - 2/5

Priority - 5/5

Fog

The Fog graphics setting is pretty straightforward, affecting the realism and density of fog that appears in AC Odyssey. It's a not a graphical benefit that'll be seen often, 

Performance Impact - 1/5

Priority - 3/5

Water

The Water graphics setting in AC Odyssey impacts the quality of the water rendering. The higher the Water setting, the more realistically transparent a body of water looks. Considering just how much of ACO takes place in or around water, this setting can be crucial to the experience.

Performance Impact - 1/5

Priority - 5/5

Screen Space Reflections

Screen Space Reflections, or SSR, adjusts the rendering quality of reflections on wet surfaces. This can impact both large bodies of water and slick surfaces such as rain on cobbled streets. It's a luxury in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, but a very nice one.

Performance Impact - 1/5

Priority - 4/5

Volumetric Clouds

Everybody loves fluffy clouds, and this particular graphics setting is all about how realistically clouds are rendered in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. On Ultra, clouds can be presented as billowing, dynamic, and realistic, while on Low they can appear flat and static. Interestingly, we found this to be the most expensive graphics setting in the entirety of AC Odyssey, so perhaps consider dropping Volumetric Clouds down to High or Medium for much faster frame rates.

Performance Impact - 4/5

Priority - 2/5

Texture Detail (Characters)

Use higher texture quality for more detailed textures, or lower texture quality to increase performance.

Performance Impact - 1/5

Priority - 3/5

Character

Adjust detail level on characters you meet in Assassins Creed Odyssey. The difference between Medium to Ultra is practically imperceptible outside of cut-scenes, so despite the low frame rate hit this could be a worthwhile setting to dial down. Our recommendation is that Character is set to Medium as a minimum though, as Low, well, see for yourself below.

Performance Impact - 0/5

Priority - 2/5

Ambient Occlusion

Adjust self-shadowing of objects. As always, this is one of our favourite visual effects. It is fairly expensive to enable Ambient Occlusion, however, and after the Medium setting, it becomes a case of diminishing returns. 

Performance Impact - 3/5

Priority - 4/5

Depth of Field

Off: all objects appear in focus.
Low or High: distant objects appear blurry.
Use Low setting to improve performance on higher resolutions

Performance Impact - 0/5

Priority - 3/5