We love when games come with their own photo mode. Being able to pause the action, move the camera around, apply filters and effects, and take amazing screenshots without using any console cheats or external utilities means every player can feel like a professional photographer. So, we were pretty stoked to see Assassin's Creed: Origins has a nifty photo mode.

As I pointed out in my 8 things I wish I knew before playing Assassin's Creed: Origins, I spent a lot of my time taking pictures of the various NPCs and members of the livestock community I accidentally (or deliberately) knocked over with my horse. A few examples:

Beyond citizen bowling, the photo mode is also great for taking lovely shots of the amazing views and vistas the game offers, be they Egyptian ruins, Greek cities, sun-bleached deserts, or sparkling seas.

We'd love to see what you've been taking pictures of while you've been playing Assassin's Creed: Origins. And if you haven't used photo mode yet, it can be accessed by tapping the F3 key while in-game. To find your pictures, look in \Documents\Assassin's Creed Origins\photos.

Drop a link to an image of your best photo in the comments and we’ll collect the best submissions in a showcase a few days from now.  

There have been quite a lot of complaints about the load that Assassin's Creed: Origins puts on CPUs, attributed in this Torrentfreak report to Ubisoft's anti-piracy efforts. Since the once-mighty Denuvo is now a soft target, Ubisoft has bolstered it with VMProtect, which adds another layer of digital armor that crackers have to get through, and according to the report it drops the game's performance by an estimated 30 to 40 percent. 

This is all based on the word of a cracker who claims to have obtained AC: Origin's binary code. "This layer of VMProtect will make Denuvo a lot more harder to trace and keygen than without it," they said. "But if you are a legit customer, well, it’s not that great for you since this combo could tank your performance by a lot, especially if you are using a low-mid range CPU. That’s why we are seeing 100 percent CPU usage on 4 core CPUs right now for example." 

In a statement posted on Steam, however, Ubisoft declared that "the anti-tamper solutions implemented in the Windows PC version of Assassin’s Creed Origins have no perceptible effect on game performance." 

"Assassin’s Creed Origins uses the full extent of the minimum and recommended PC system requirements here: http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/1759689 while ensuring a steady 30 fps performance," a rep wrote. "We’re committed to ensuring the most optimum experience possible for everyone, and we advise any players who may encounter performance issues on PC to check out support.ubi.com as there might be already a workaround or to contact us further explaining their issues so that we can solve them." 

It's worth bearing in mind that the system requirements are pretty stiff—a Core i5 with 6GB RAM and a GTX 660 is the listed minimum—while the promise of "steady 30 fps performance" from of that kind of hardware is maybe a little underwhelming. There are known issues with AMD cards as well, which muddies the waters even further. 

It wouldn't be the first time that a game comes out running fine on powerful hardware while struggling at the lower end of the scale—Dishonored 2 comes immediately to mind—and despite Ubisoft's insistence that the DRM isn't responsible, it does appear to be working on a fix: Ubisoft forum user AOD_SN0ST0RM said a rep told them that Ubi will "address this in a future update to the game. ... Once we have more information on our upcoming update(s), it will be posted on our forums."

I'm still working my way through Assassin's Creed: Origins, and I'll have a full review in a few days (my review in progress can be seen here in the meantime). 

I estimate I'm about two-thirds through the game, and with much of the world explored and a bloody handful of assassinations under my belt, I've got a few nuggets of wisdom for you in the form of things I wish I knew before I started playing.

You can tell if you'll be able to kill someone before you try to kill them

As an assassin, one-hit kills are your bread and butter. So, it's handy to know in advance if you'll achieve one or if your target will be stubborn about going to the grave. Origins is nice enough to give you that information.

As you can see in the gif above, while lining up a bowshot, you can essentially see the future state of your enemy's health bar. If it's all red, it means that the single shot you're about to make will kill them. If there's some white left in the meter, it means your shot will just wound them. Also note that where you aim matters: the same arrow aimed at that guy's shoulder shows a little health will remain after he's hit, while aiming at his head predicts a complete kill.

The same goes for sneaky assassinations using your wrist blade. When you're close enough to stab your mark, you'll be able to tell if you're about to engage in a quick, quiet kill, or a prolonged struggle.

You can set arrows on fire with your own torch

There's a couple ways to set your arrows on fire in Origins. You can creep over to a lit brazier, or fire an arrow over an open flame at an enemy. Those require a source of fire that may not be terribly convenient, however, especially if you're in a nice hiding spot and don't want to scuttle out of it.

Luckily, you always have a torch in your inventory, and that torch can be dropped at your feet. Origins doesn't tell you this, but you can then use that grounded torch to set the tip of your arrow on fire. Just plop the torch down and draw your bow close to it, and voila.

Red skull icons aren't messing around

Tagging enemies displays their level, and if they're a higher level than you, that icon will be red. It doesn't mean you can't take them on, just that they'll be tougher and you'll have to work harder to bring them down.

However, if they're a few extra levels above you, you'll see a red icon with a skull. That means, basically, you're not even in the same league as your enemy. Initially I thought, so what? So he's maybe five or ten levels above me: he's still a standard guard made of meat and I still have a bunch of pointy objects to stick into him.

Origins doesn't work like that. Trying to chisel away his heath meter was like trying to melt an iceberg with a single matchstick, and the weapons that had been so easily carving up goons suddenly seemed to be made of foam. Meanwhile, they hit you like a train, and the train hasn't been invented yet. Steer clear and come back later. Much later.

You can dismantle your weapons for parts

It took me a while to realize this, but as you find or buy higher level weapons, you can convert the old ones into crafting ingredients. This can be a time saver: if you find yourself short a few sticks of wood or metal, you may be able to skip a hunting trip or convoy ambush and just strip some of your old gear for parts, then use those resources to improve your armor, quiver, or assassin's blades.

You can booby trap braziers

When enemies call in reinforcements, it doesn't just mean more soldiers will arrive. The guys who answer the call are Phylakes, soldiers who are tough as nails and should be avoided whenever possible. So, when infiltrating a camp or fort, you're going to want to prevent enemies from lighting their brazier to call for help.

Completely avoiding detection as you stab your way through the guards is the best way to do this, but you still want to hedge your bets. If you can safely reach the brazier itself, you can rig it with a trap. Then, if you're spotted later, the dope trying to light the signal will not only be dead, but the brazier itself will be destroyed. Two birds, one explosion.

You're vulnerable while using eagle vision

At just about any time in Origins, you can look through the eyes of your eagle pal, Senu. This is immensely cool and useful for scouting, spotting threats, tagging enemies, and targeting objectives. While your brain is in the eagle, though, don't forget you still have a human body, and that body stays right where it is, vulnerable to discovery and attack.

Or, in this particular example, vulnerable to fire. I'd crabwalked to the edge of a tower, but didn't notice I was right up against a lit brazier. While my brain was in Senu, my clothes caught on fire. Whoops! The master of stealth, ladies and gentlemen.

There's a great photo mode

I was a several hours in before I noticed a photo mode listed in the keybindings. We here at PC Gamer love games with photo modes, and Origins lets you pause the action with the F3 key, move the camera around in the 3D space, apply filters, and take some nice shots.

Other players can see your photos

It took me a while to notice this, too. On your map you'll see some small rectangles, which represent the photos taken by other players. It's nice to see what your friends are up to, where they've been, and what they've seen.

Just, um, keep in mind they'll be able to see what you're taking pictures of too. I found myself a little embarrassed because all I'd been doing with the photo mode was taking pictures of me running over pedestrians with my horse. Seriously, I had probably twenty pictures of me trampling pedestrians scattered around the map before I realized other people could see them. Plus one picture of a goat watching a dog pee on the side of a building. If I'd known my friends could see my vacation pics I might have taken some nicer ones.

Assassin's Creed Origins is one of the strongest entries in the long-running series. Taking a year's break paid off, and Egypt comes to life in a game that's frequently visually stunning. But there's a dark side to the brotherhood—well, another dark side—and it's that the game has some steep hardware requirements.

Ubisoft lists a GTX 660 or R9 270 graphics card as its minimum hardware requirements, with an i5-2400s or FX-6350 CPU. That doesn't sound too bad, but it's important to note that Ubisoft is talking about 30 fps at 720p minimum quality settings, not 60 fps at 1080p. The recommended hardware meanwhile is a GTX 760 or R9 280X, with an i7-3770 or FX-8350, but again that's only likely to get you 30 fps at 1080p high settings.

In my testing, for 1080p medium at 30 fps you'll need at least a GTX 1050—which equates to a GTX 960, GTX 770, or GTX 680. The GTX 760 is a fairly sizeable 15-25 percent step down from the 770 (which I've tested below), so 1080p high seems an unlikely target. On the AMD side, you'll need an RX 560 or R9 380 for 1080p medium, and the R9 280X is going to be around that same level of performance. 1080p high should be doable, but only at 30 fps.

As far as features go, Assassin's Creed Origins does nearly everything right, with the exception of mod support. That's keeping with Ubisoft tradition, which is unfortunate as we'd love to see the modding community tweak some aspects of the game. There have been texture updates for some of the previous games, but not much more than that. Ultrawide support is nearly perfect, except for in the small number of cutscenes. These show black bars on the right and left, but the menus and game world all look stunning on 21:9 displays.

The graphics settings seem like a fairly comprehensive list, and I'll dig into the individual settings and their performance impact at the end of the article. The only problem is that most of the settings only cause a small change in performance. On modern GPUs like the GTX 1060 and above, or the RX 570 and above, going from ultra high quality to very low quality only improves performance by about 50 percent. Cards with less than 4GB VRAM may show greater improvements in performance, but it still requires a fast GPU if you want to get above 60 fps.

MSI provided all the hardware for my testing with its Gaming X graphics cards for most of the models. The Vega 56 and 64 are reference designs, however, as MSI has not yet announced or released any custom solutions. While I've previously used MSI's Aegis Ti3 as the primary test platform, it turns out that an i7-7700K can actually limit performance on the faster GPUs, so I've moved to MSI's Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC as the weapon of choice, with 16GB of DDR4-3200 CL14 memory from G.Skill. I also had some issues getting Origins to run on several of the MSI notebooks, so I've included the GT73VR results in the primary charts.

So what does it actually take to run the game well? You'll need both a fast CPU and a fast graphics card to get the most out of Assassin's Creed Origins on PC, and Nvidia GPUs currently show substantially better performance than AMD's GPUs.

Ubisoft says it hasn't used any Nvidia GameWorks libraries this time, and told us, "We have been working very closely with both AMD and NVIDIA for quite a while (and continue to do so) to allow us maximize performance on both GPUs. We are committed to taking advantage of any performance gains available with the new drivers to help players have the best experience they can in ACO with the hardware they have. You can expect we will take the opportunity to make any tweaks which lead to performance gains in the upcoming updates."

All of my current testing was done with the 1.03 patch, using Nvidia's latest 388.13 drivers and AMD's 17.11.1 drivers—which is an update from the initial testing I did at the time of launch. The 1.03 patch smoothed out some of the minimum fps problems, and Nvidia performance across nearly all GPUs improved substantially. AMD performance meanwhile remained flat, with some minor drops in some cases. Hopefully future patches and/or driver updates will help Radeon owners out.

AC Origins includes a built-in benchmark, under the graphics menu, which is what I used for testing. I also did a manual performance run through the starting city of Siwa, including sword fights, assassinations, and riding around on a horse, and found that the built-in benchmark gives a reasonable comparison point. Variation between runs is lower, and it's within a few percent of the performance I measured while playing the game normally. If you wander off into the desert, performance—particularly on AMD cards—is higher, but much of the game will be spent in the cities, which are more taxing.

Starting at 1080p medium, which represents a decent compromise between performance and image quality, AMD users should immediately see red flags. The fastest AMD GPUs max out at less than 60 fps, while Nvidia GPUs can break into the 100+ fps range. More critically, even the GTX 1060 3GB is able to beat the Vega 64.

I've done extensive testing of AC Origins, on multiple CPUs and motherboards, and these results are very consistent. Unless you want to benchmark the game outside of the cities, AMD GPUs come up seriously short. AMD GPU utilization was often in the 60-80 percent range, indicating other bottlenecks besides the GPU core are limiting performance. It could be geometry throughput, but even using the very low preset (which disables tessellation and sets all the other options to minimum) the RX Vega 64 only scored 71 fps at 1080p. There's obviously more work to do to get AC Origins running well on AMD hardware, and Nvidia easily wins any comparisons you might make at these settings.

It's not just AMD hardware struggling with the game, as Intel's HD Graphics 630 (running on an i7-7700K) couldn't even get above 20 fps at 720p minimum quality. You'll need a decent GPU to run Origins.

Moving up to 1080p ultra, Nvidia continues to dominate, with the 1060 6GB beating every AMD GPU. The game settings menu estimates VRAM use of about 2.8GB using these settings, so the 1060 3GB still manages to perform well enough, but for very high and ultra quality you'll likely want a 4GB GPU. I'll discuss the settings more in a moment, but AC Origins can definitely push your GPU to its limits.

As before, GPU utilization on AMD cards isn't above 90 percent on the faster models, indicating other bottlenecks. The Vega cards do fine in less populated areas, but as soon as you enter a city, framerates can drop by 50 percent or more. If you're looking for 60 fps or higher at 1080p ultra, only the GTX 1070 and above accomplish that feat, though the GTX 1060 and Vega cards can get there at 1080p high settings.

1440p requires some serious hardware if you want to come close to 60 fps—and yes, there's a very clear difference in feel between 30 and 60 fps in AC Origins. Only the GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti get there, though overclocking the 1070 Ti and maybe the 1070 (with a few tweaks to settings) should suffice as well.

Vega can also break 60 fps with the right settings, but there's a lot more microstuttering (dips below the average framerate) on AMD cards. AMD's Vega cards start to gain on Nvidia at 1440p, and GPU utilization also increases. Basically, drivers and CPU become less of a limiting factor as resolution increases.

If you're sporting multiple graphics cards, you're unfortunately out of luck—Origins won't use currently more than a single GPU. Considering the CPU limits imposed by the engine, that's probably for the best, and this is one more major release in a growing list where SLI and CrossFire won't do you any good. That may change in the future, but I wouldn't count on it.

Not surprisingly, 4k ultra is mostly out of reach for now. If you want to get 60 fps at 4k, your only real choice is going to be 1080 Ti, and then use a combination of medium and high settings. Even the GTX 1080 at minimum quality only averages in the mid-50s at 4k—and yes, it will go higher in less demanding areas of the game, but on the whole you'll see plenty of drops below 60.

4k is also the only place where the Vega cards can start to match Nvidia's 1070 and 1070 Ti. Minimum framerates still favor Nvidia hardware, but it shows that when the GPU cores are the major limitation, AMD's hardware holds up pretty well. Either the drivers or the game engine are holding the cards back at lower resolutions and settings.

For CPU tests, I've got two different GPUs run on several CPUs. I've included a few options with RX Vega 64 to show how CPU performance limits AMD's faster GPUs. But the primary CPU testing, and what I'll focus on here, is done with the GTX 1080 Ti. For the framerate overlays, I've focused on the primary points of interest, the i7-8700K, i3-8100, Ryzen 7 1800X, and Ryzen 5 1600X, running at 1080p ultra.

The 8700K is the fastest gaming CPU in nearly every game I've tested, which isn't too surprising. Ryzen 7 1800X by comparison falls well short of that mark, though it just edges out the new quad-core i3-8100. But what's really interesting is that Threadripper 1920X and 1950X actually show substantially better performance from the AMD processors.

There aren't many games that will scale beyond 6-core/12-thread, and on Intel CPUs that remains true of Assassin's Creed Origins, but on AMD the Threadripper chips are a solid 25 percent faster than the Ryzen 1800X. It could be that Origins throws around so many threads for AI and physics that Threadripper pulls ahead, or it might be the additional memory bandwidth offered by the platform. Either way, Threadripper owners can at least be happy about gaming performance for a change. Also note that the 1.03 patch allows the game to run on CPUs with more than 24 threads, which wasn't possible with the initial release.

Assassin's Creed Origins settings guide

There are 15 settings that can be tweaked that directly affect image quality and help improve performance. There are also several others that are related but affect performance in other ways—like resolution scaling, adaptive quality, v-sync, and the framerate cap. Individually, most of the settings only have a moderate effect on performance, and that's when going from maximum quality to minimum quality. Here are all the major settings, along with the approximate impact on performance (measured with a GTX 1070 and Vega 56).

General Settings

Graphic Quality (Very Low/Low/Medium/High/Very High/Ultra High): a preset that provides a quick way to adjust all the other settings. Very low sets everything to minimum and ultra high sets everything to maximum (and requires the HD texture pack). There's about a 50 percent improvement in performance going from ultra to very low, and up to a 100 percent increase on GPUs with less than 3GB VRAM.

Adaptive Quality (Off/30 FPS/45 FPS/60 FPS): dynamically adjusts anti-aliasing quality to reach the desired framerate if enabled. I test with this off to ensure identical settings for all tested GPUs.

Anti-Aliasing (Off/Low/Medium/High): attempts to remove jaggies, apparently via SMAA and/or FXAA. Disabling improves performance by about four percent.

Shadows (Very Low/Low/Medium/High/Very High/Ultra High): affects the filtering quality and resolution of shadow maps. This is one of the more demanding individual settings, though turning this down still only improves performance by around six percent.

Environment Settings

Environment Details (Very Low/Low/Medium/High/Very High/Ultra High): adjusts the graphical complexity of environmental elements. Going from ultra to very low only improves performance by one percent in testing.

Texture Detail (Very Low/Low/Medium/High): the quality of textures used in the game. If you have enough VRAM, turning this down only improves performance by 1-2 percent, though on cards with less than 3GB it can cause a larger change.

Tessellation (Off/Medium/High/Very High): applies displacement maps to enhance the geometry details of surfaces. Turning this off only improves performance by 1-2 percent.

Terrain (Medium/High): adjusts the detail of the terrain, and using the lower setting improves performance by 4-5 percent.

Clutter (Low/Medium/High/Very High): affects the density of various forms of clutter—grass, rocks, and other small objects. Turning this down improves performance by 3-4 percent.

Fog (Medium/High/Very High): adjusts the fog accuracy, with a relatively negligible impact on visuals. Turning this down improves performance by up to five percent.

Water (Low/Medium/High/Very High): adjust the level of detail of water. Minimum quality only improves performance by 1-2 percent.

Screen Space Reflections (Off/Medium/High): controls the rendering quality of reflections on wet surfaces. I only saw a 1-2 percent change in performance, though in water scenes it might have a bigger impact.

Volumetric Clouds (Off/On): turns the volumetric clouds on or off, with a pretty sizeable five percent change in performance, though the sky looks quite boring with this off.

Characters Settings

Texture Detail (Very Low/Low/Medium/High): adjusts texture quality of character entities (people and animals) in the world. Turning this down causes negligible 1-2 percent improvement in performance.

Character (Very Low/Low/Medium/High/Very High/Ultra High): level of detail on characters, again with a small one percent impact on performance.

Postprocessing Settings

Ambient Occlusion (Off/High/Very High): a lighting effect that controls the self-shadowing of objects. This is the most demanding setting in the game, along with shadows, and turning it off improves performance by around six percent.

Depth of Field (Off/On): simulates a camera's focus range and blurs out the background. I didn't measure any change in performance with this setting.

AC Origins is a bit interesting in that the combined impact of the settings appears to be the product of the individual settings—meaning, there aren't many 'freebies' that you can leave on with zero change in performance. Of course, most of the settings only cause a minor change in performance, so there's only a limited ability to improve performance. AC Origins ends up being demanding at virtually any setting.

In terms of visuals, going from the Very Low to the Low preset yields a good improvement in image quality with a negligible change in performance (about five percent). Similarly, going from Very High to Ultra only drops performance about three percent, so I'm not sure why Ubisoft felt the need to include six presets when two of them are mostly redundant—we would have been fine with Low/Medium/High/Ultra and just skip the Very Low and Very High alternatives.

Are the system requirements accurate?

Ubisoft gives the following minimum and recommended system requirements:

Minimum

• OS: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 (64-bit versions only).
• Processor: Intel Core i5-2400s @ 2.5 GHz or AMD FX-6350 @ 3.9 GHz or equivalent.
• Video card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 or AMD R9 270 (2048 MB VRAM with Shader Model 5.0 or better).
• System RAM: 6GB.
• Resolution: 720p.
• Video Preset: Lowest.

Recommended

• OS: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 (64-bit versions only).
• Processor: Intel Core i7- 3770 @ 3.5 GHz or AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0 GHz.
• Video card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 or AMD R9 280X (3GB VRAM with Shader Model 5.0 or better).
• System RAM: 8GB.
• Resolution: 1080p.
• Video Preset: High.

Based on my results from the GTX 770 and R9 380, I'm not sure a GTX 660 or R9 270 will consistently hit 30 fps. For the recommended specs, the GTX 760 is typically around 25 percent slower than the GTX 770, while the R9 280X is about equal to the R9 380 I tested. Those are only pulling around 40 fps at 1080p medium, so 1080p high is a stretch, but they should do fine for 30 fps with a few tweaks.

For the CPU side, an i3-8100 is a significant bottleneck on faster GPUs, but only if you're shooting for 60+ fps. If you're only going for 30 fps, just about any decent CPU should suffice. I'd be concerned with older 2-core/4-thread Core i3 parts, but they should still be able to get 30 fps.

My personal recommendation for AC Origins would be at least a GTX 1060 6GB. Until and unless the performance improves on AMD hardware, it's going to be less desirable in AC Origins. For 1440p gaming, the GTX 1070 Ti and the existing 1070 and 1080 cards will be your weapons of choice, assuming you can't manage to splurge on the 1080 Ti. And for your CPU, 6-core processors like the i5-8400 help if you have a top-shelf GPU, but you can still get decent framerates from a 4-core/4-thread CPU like the i3-8100 or the previous generation i5-7400.

What about this DRM business?

There have also been reports circulated about DRM causing the high CPU utilization, based on statements made by the cracker/pirate Voksi. Ubisoft denies those claims, and without an actual cracked version it's impossible to say one way or the other. AC Origins has not yet been cracked after more than two weeks, so the VMProtect + Denuvo approach is succeeding in that respect. But Voksi has offered 'proof' that DRM calls are made during character movement, which causes a heavy CPU load.

Again, it's impossible to measure the actual performance impact without a working crack, but what I've seen is that CPU utilization jumps way up in the cities, particularly if you're using a fast GPU. CPU utilization also drops substantially if you're using a slower GPU.

In other words, calculating all the AI, physics, graphics, etc. consumes a lot of CPU time. It's not character movement but rather framerate and location that largely determines CPU load. Out in the desert, framerates are substantially higher, and CPU utilization is lower, which again indicates that it is in fact AI and graphics calculations causing the CPU spikes and not some unrelated DRM calculations.

If you look at the CPU performance results above, clearly quad-core processors can be fully utilized in AC Origins. I saw consistent 100 percent CPU load on 4-core/4-thread and 4-core/8-thread CPUs, and even the 6-core/6-thread i5-8400 is close to 100 percent load in the cities.

Running at 100 percent CPU utilization isn't inherently bad—it used to be that all games would peg your CPU at 100 percent, back before we had quad-core and higher CPUs. It just means doing other stuff (livestreaming, or watching Twitch on a secondary display) will need more cores/threads than you're used to. It also means you might see occasional dips in performance if a background task kicks off. If you want a consistent 60+ fps in AC Origins, you'll want a fast graphics card and a fast CPU.