Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced PC Performance Review

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is out now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. When the original launched in 2013, it stood apart from the series by trading rooftops for the open sea, casting players as pirate Edward Kenway and letting them sail a living Caribbean that few games have matched since. Ubisoft has now rebuilt one of the series' most popular entries on the latest Anvil engine, the same one behind Assassin's Creed Shadows. The remake reworks the game's assets for the current times, includes ray tracing, removes loading screens between cities, and adds more than six hours of new content to the original story.

For this review, we're focusing specifically on PC performance — how Resynced runs, how it scales, and whether that visual ambition holds up in practice.

Testing Rig

For testing, I paired the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, which sits on the MSI Z890 Gaming Plus Wi-Fi motherboard, and 48GB of Kingston Fury Renegade non-binary DDR5 RAM clocked at 6000MT/s (using XMP Profile 3). Storage was handled by a WD Black SN850X (2TB).

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced was tested on an MSI G274F monitor with a 180Hz refresh rate. The GPU driver version used was 610.74, which was rolled out on July 7.

CPU	Intel Core Ultra 9 285K
GPU	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070
GPU Driver Version	Version 610.74
Motherboard	MSI Z890 Gaming Plus Wi-Fi
RAM	48GB DDR5 (6000MT/s) Kingston Fury Renegade
Storage	WD Black SN850X (2TB)
PSU	MSI MAG A1000GL
Monitor	MSI G274F 180Hz Gaming Monitor

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced Graphics Settings and Features

Black Flag Resynced auto-configures its graphics on first launch, sampling your hardware and setting a sensible baseline before you touch anything. If you've played Assassin's Creed Shadows, the menu layout will feel immediately familiar, since Resynced runs on the same Anvil engine and carries over much of the same graphics framework. Everything sits within the Video settings, split across Display and Scalability menus, and the game leans on two independent controls that are worth understanding before you start tuning.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced PC Performance Review

The first is the Overall Preset, which sets the usual spread of scalability options like characters, textures, geometry and water across a named tier, running from Low up to Ultra. The second is the Raytracing Mode, and the game is explicit that the two don't move together: changing your preset doesn't touch your ray tracing setting, and the reverse holds too. Ray tracing itself comes in three states. Off falls back to a precomputed lighting solution for the best performance at a visible cost to lighting quality, Standard enables raytraced global illumination (RTGI) for diffuse lighting, and Extended adds reflective surfaces on top, which the game flags as the heaviest option of the three. It's this Standard-versus-Extended split that does most of the heavy lifting in the benchmarks later on.

There's also a dedicated Steam Deck preset, which is a welcome addition. Rather than leaving handheld players to wrestle the sliders down themselves, the game ships with a configuration tuned specifically to run optimally on the Deck.

Photo Credit: Ubisoft

One small gripe while tuning: switching between presets prompts a game restart each time, which makes experimenting more tedious than it should be. It's a minor thing, but plenty of recent releases let you swap presets on the fly, so having to reload to compare settings feels like a step back.

On the upscaling side, the game supports the full modern stack. An Automatic setting picks the best upscaler for your hardware, or you can force XeSS, FSR, DLSS (NVIDIA GPUs only), or Ubisoft's own TAA implementation manually. Dynamic Resolution Scaling is on by default and adjusts source resolution in real time based on your chosen upscaler quality, and frame generation (2x to 6x) sits alongside it for the bigger frame rate gains, which, as the numbers will show, is where the real movement comes from at 1080p.

A few smaller touches round things out. There's a VRAM meter built into the options menu that estimates consumption based on your scalability, ray tracing and resolution settings, a genuinely useful readout given how sensitive this engine is to VRAM pressure, with stutters the tell-tale sign of an overcommitted card. There's also a configurable FOV slider (PC only), colourblind presets, and a full benchmark tool accessible through the Animus Hub that runs a camera fly-through and hands back a performance recap, which is exactly what I used to gather the numbers that follow.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced Performance and FPS Data

All testing was done at 1080p on the rig above, sweeping across two presets, both ray tracing modes, and every combination of DLSS and Frame Generation. Frame generation throughout was set to 2x. The numbers below come from the game's built-in benchmark tool, which reports average CPU and GPU frame times alongside the frame rate, and it's those two columns that end up telling the real story.

Starting with native performance, and the RTX 5070 handles Black Flag Resynced comfortably. On the Ultra High preset with no upscaling, the card averages 98fps, with 1% lows at 74 and 0.1% lows at 69. That's a strong result for a maxed-out remake running full ray tracing at native 1080p, and on a high refresh panel it feels every bit as smooth as the average suggests. Drop to Medium and the average climbs to 143fps with 1% lows at 104. Neither preset dips into uncomfortable territory at any point, and the gap between them is large enough that players chasing frames have a real reason to step down if the rig does not support it.

The frame consistency is where the game genuinely impresses. Across every configuration, the 1% and 0.1% lows stay close to the average rather than crashing well below it, which is the difference between a number that looks good on paper and one that actually feels good in motion. On Ultra High native, the 0.1% low of 69 against a 98 average means the worst-case frames never fall off a cliff, and with Frame Generation active on Medium, the 1% low sits at a remarkable 154fps. Stutter simply wasn't a factor in any run, and the frame-time graph stayed clean throughout, which speaks well of how the Anvil engine is streaming this rebuilt Caribbean.

Config	Avg FPS	1% low	0.1% low	CPU ms	GPU ms	VRAM
Ultra High, Standard, No DLSS (TAA)	98	74	69	10	10	6.9 GB
Ultra High, Standard, DLSS	98	75	70	10	10	7.1 GB
Ultra High, Standard, DLSS + FG 2x	136	112	102	14	12	7.5 GB
Ultra High, Extended, DLSS + FG 2x	138	116	101	14	12	7.5 GB
Ultra High, Extended, DLSS	96	73	68	10	10	7.2 GB
Medium, Standard, No DLSS (TAA)	143	104	90	7	6	4.7 GB
Medium, Standard, DLSS	142	104	93	7	6	4.9 GB
Medium, Standard, DLSS + FG 2x	178	154	126	11	9	5.3 GB
Medium, Extended, DLSS + FG 2x	142	105	94	7	6	4.9 GB
Medium, Extended, DLSS	138	101	90	7	6	5.0 GB

One quirk worth a mention: turning DLSS on at Quality barely changes the average, holding at 98fps on Ultra High and 142 against 143 native on Medium. At 1080p on this hardware, the frame rate is set by the CPU rather than the graphics card, and since DLSS only lightens the GPU's load, it can't add frames the processor is already capping. It's a minor curiosity rather than a problem, and it points to the setting that does move the needle.

That setting is Frame Generation. On Ultra High it lifts the average from 98 to 136fps, and on Medium with Standard ray tracing it reaches 178, both with the healthy lows noted above intact. It's the one lever that reliably buys frames here, and the added fluidity is immediately noticeable without any real cost to image quality during normal play. Ray tracing, meanwhile, is more forgiving than expected: moving from Standard to the heavier Extended mode costs only 2 to 4fps, so you can run the game's most demanding lighting for very little at this resolution.

VRAM never came close to being a concern, peaking at 7.5GB on the Ultra High preset with RT Extended runs and staying under 5.5GB on Medium, comfortably within range of any card that meets the game's requirements. The short version for anyone on similar hardware is that Black Flag Resynced runs well at 1080p, holds its frame times together nicely, and if you want more frames, Frame Generation is the setting to reach for.

Should You Buy Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced?

On performance, Black Flag Resynced is a well-behaved PC release. At 1080p, the RTX 5070 averaged 98 fps maxed out with full ray tracing and 143 fps on Medium, with frame times holding steady throughout. The lows tracked close to the averages, stutter never crept in, and VRAM stayed in check. DLSS does little on its own here, but Frame Generation picks up the slack, and Extended ray tracing incurs surprisingly little cost.

Photo Credit: Ubisoft

As for the game itself, it's a genuine looker. The Caribbean has never been this inviting, all turquoise shallows and sun-bleached ports, and the ray-traced lighting adds real warmth and depth to the world. And the environments hold up well under the new engine. And you can finally flick the hood up or down whenever you please. Game-changing stuff. If you sailed with Edward Kenway as a teenager and want to revisit one of the franchise's most-loved entries, Resynced is worth a look.