Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced: Best settings for PC performance

This rare hardware-y appearance in Guides Town comes courtesy of a certain remade plunder 'em up, in which I've spent... yeesh, nearly six hours poking around the graphics options in search of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced best settings for PC.

In many games, this kind of thing is a doddle, as a lot of individual settings don't affect the performance of modern graphics cards and CPUs either way – meaning you can keep a bunch of the best-looking settings, while still claiming a tasty framerate boost with just a handful of tactical lowerings. And, in all likelihood, some upscaling. Black Flag Resynced, however, actually does run faster (even if by small margins) when you drop almost any of its 20-plus individual settings, presenting a trickier choice of what to tone down and what to crank up.

Still, after much benchmarking – and verifying with normal play - I think I've cracked it. There's a combination of Medium, High, and Ultra High settings that tidily preserve Resynced's windswept good looks, while bumping up performance over the more, some might say needlessly, demanding presets.

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Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced: Best settings for PC performance

Here's the full list of settings to try. Black Flag Resynced will prompt you for a restart when you change most of the visual options, so it's worth applying these all at once to minimise delays.

I used a GeForce RTX 4060, at 1080p, to work out which settings hide the biggest performance gains; obviously if you've got an RTX 5080 you can afford to go prettier, but statistically speaking, this should be a good settings config for most PCs. It specifically got my 4060 rig averaging a smooth 81fps, which compared to the presets, is almost as fast as running Ultra Low with native-rez TAA. And even removing the upscaling advantage, by setting DLSS to Native AA mode, it still averaged 62fps – just 3fps slower than the Medium preset, while keeping plenty of individual settings at High or above.

Ultra High preset, 1920x1080, TAA Native AA

Some of these made for minor surprises, like texture resolution, which looks noticeably nicer on Ultra High than its lower equivalents – yet only got the RTX 4060 running 1fps faster after I dropped it from Very High to Medium. Conversely, the single biggest devourer of frames is the very familiar culprit of shadow quality, though this too behaved a little quirkily. Dropping from Very High to Low was enough to grant the 4060 an additional 10fps, on par with the application of upscaling, but then the Medium and High settings were only slower than Low by 1 and 2fps respectively. With results like that, you may as well stick to High.

If you want to make your own changes to these settings, and have got the FPS headroom for it, ray tracing might be worth a look. I've left it on the table in the list above, but applied with care, it can polish up Black Flag Resynced's effects without utterly wrecking performance. I'd suggest the following: slap the main ray tracing option on Extended mode, which makes sure you get the full range of improved effects, but then turn down the ray tracing quality and BVH quality sub-settings from Very High to Medium. A combination of the latter runs about 10% faster than a combination of the former, and to my eyes, doesn't look 10% uglier.

With those Medium RT settings in play, and keeping DLSS on Quality mode, my RTX 4060's average only dipped from 81fps to 67fps. And while the benchmark tool doesn't quite capture the sustained demand of parkouring around a busy Caribbean city, that's still enough to get 60fps (or thereabouts) during Black Flag Resynced's most power-hungry moments.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Ubisoft

None of this is to say that Ubisoft's remake needs open heart surgery to to survive an acute framerate blockage. Other than a solitary bit of slowdown I had, during a clumsy landing off a Havanan rooftop, Black Flag Resynced has been stable and fluid throughout my testing. All while showing off, and maybe even in spite of, some arguably series-best environmental design work. But it can and does benefit from the line-by-line approach to its visual settings, so give that list above a whirl.

Playing on something other than a Windows PC? You lucky pirate: we've got a Steam Deck and Steam Machine performance 'n' settings guide too. Jeremy's also looked at what the remake changes over the original, and has provided some handy tips on how to get Black Flag Resynced's rope dart.