AC Valhalla gets 60fps option Xbox Series S and stable 60fps on Series X, PS5

Ubisoft will release an update for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla on Thursday, which will also make the game playable on Series S at 60fps. This frame rate was already achievable on the more powerful PS5 and Series X, but 60fps was not always achieved there. That would be the case now.

From the description of Title Update 1.0.4 of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, it appears that Ubisoft is introducing two separate graphics modes, more often found in games for the next-gen consoles. It is a Performance and a Visual Quality mode. Until now, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla had a single mode.

In Performance mode, the game will “adjust the resolution and graphics settings to maintain 60fps.” The Quality mode ‘allows the game to run at the maximum resolution and graphics settings, maintaining 30fps’. The default setting will be Performance on Series X and PlayStation 5 and Quality on Series S.

Most likely there will be the use of dynamic resolution again, as was already the case with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla on the next-gen consoles. However, Ubisoft does not make clear to what extent the resolution and the graphic details are reduced in the Performance mode. Especially the step from 30 to 60fps on the Series S would be a remarkable improvement, although it is not clear to what extent this leads to a lower resolution and less or less refined graphic details.

From an earlier analysis by Digital Foundry, the situation without the new patch showed fluctuations between 1440p and 1728p on the Series X and PS5, with 60fps being the target. The PS5 proved to maintain that goal better than the Series X, with the frame rate sometimes dropping below 60. On the Series S, the dynamic resolution went from 1188p to about 1656p, although 30fps was the maximum.