Assassin’s Creed Mirage: PC performance and the best settings to use
Smooth cuts, on desktop and Steam Deck alike
Assassin’s Creed Mirage is, so says the Alice B review, "the most enjoyable Assassin’s Creed game for years." That’s thanks in part to a returning focus on classic AC stealthing in a single, densely detailed city, and this back-to-basics approach extends to the technical side too. Mirage cares not for being the glossy poster child of ray-traced glamour; it’s just a game that looks pretty nice and runs well on PC, older hardware and Steam Decks included.
It also keeps its list of graphics settings relatively brief, though there are a few in there that can dish out some extra frames per second at little cost to the visuals. Here it is, then: your complete guide to Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s PC performance, from its refreshingly reasonable system requirements to its best settings combinations.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage system requirements and PC performance
Mirage’s hardware demands have risen above those of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, though by today’s AAA standards, they’re perfectly manageable. The inclusion of the AMD Radeon RX 570 as a minimum graphics card shows that Mirage doesn’t need oodles of VRAM, and up at the other end, 4K / 60fps is claimed doable on a mix of very much last-gen kit. Even the install size is modest, at about one-third of a Starfield, and unlike the spacefaring RPG, Mirage’s SSD 'requirement' is more of a polite suggestion. I’ve tried it on a hard drive and, outside of elongated load times, it works fine.
The only potential trip-up is the need for Intel Arc GPUs to run with Resizeable BAR enabled. This RAM-sharing feature, also called Smart Access Memory on AMD systems, itself requires a somewhat recent CPU, hence the Minimum spec list suggesting at least an 8th Gen Intel chip to buddy up with Arc graphics.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage Minimum PC specs (1080p / 30fps)
- GPU: Intel Arc A380 / Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB) / AMD Radeon RX 570
- CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K (Intel Core i5-8400 for Intel Arc) / AMD Ryzen 5 1600
- RAM: 8GB
- OS: Windows 10 / 11
- SSD storage: 40GB
- DirectX version: DX12
Assassin’s Creed Mirage Recommended PC specs (1080p / 60fps)
- GPU: Intel Arc A750 / Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti / AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT
- CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K / AMD Ryzen 5 3600
- RAM: 16GB
- OS: Windows 10 / 11
- SSD storage: 40GB
- DirectX version: DX12
Assassin’s Creed Mirage Enthusiast PC specs (1440p / 60fps)
- GPU: Intel Arc A770 / Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 / AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
- CPU: Intel Core i7-9700K / AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
- RAM: 16GB
- OS: Windows 10 / 11
- SSD storage: 40GB
- DirectX version: DX12
Assassin’s Creed Mirage Ultra PC specs (4K / 60fps)
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 / AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT
- CPU: Intel Core i5-11600K / AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
- RAM: 16GB
- OS: Windows 10 / 11
- SSD storage: 40GB
- DirectX version: DX12
Some housekeeping before we get into the resting results: firstly, most of my benchmarks were recorded before the day one patch that added the (largely reviled) Denuvo DRM. Despite Denuvo’s reputation for hobbling performance, however, subsequent re-tests suggest this patch hasn’t slowed down Assassin’s Creed Mirage at all, so any and all benchmark results should still be valid.
Second, Mirage’s five quality presets – Low, Medium, High, Very High, and Ultra High – can change the game’s resolution scale, essentially running the game at a lower resolution than that of your monitor without any subsequent upscaling. Since this is both ugly and a fiddly variable in benchmarking, I stuck with native resolution for all tests. Thus, for any mention of a preset in this guide, imagine adding “…and with 100% resolution scale” on the end. Same page? Jolly good.
Anyhow, there’s little need to gut sharpness when Mirage performs as comfortably as it does. The 6GB GTX 1060, which the official specs suggest is only good for 30fps at 1080p? When I tried it, the seven-year-old GPU averaged 59fps on Low quality, with Medium keeping things smooth at 53fps.
Granted, that was with the RPS test PC’s Intel Core i5-11600K and 16GB of RAM, but this CPU isn’t going to double the framerate of something like a Core i5-8400. More likely, the system requirements are just on the pessimistic side; the Recommended-tier Arc A750 also overperformed , scoring 71fps at 1080p/High.
I didn’t have any of the listed Enthusiast or Ultra GPUs to hand, though I can confirm that the popular RTX 3070 can do 75fps on Ultra High and native 1440p, while the Radeon RX 7800 XT – which costs about the same as an RTX 3080 – produced 58fps on Ultra High with the rez cranked up to 4K. And that was also native, without any upscaling.
Also, Assassin’s Creed Mirage has upscaling. Yes, it does afford itself some PC bells and whistles, mainly the full trio of Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR 2 and Intel XeSS. They work a treat, too: DLSS on Balanced mode propelled the RTX 3070 to 84fps at 4K, albeit with a preset drop to Medium. Balanced FSR 2 also boosted the RX 7800 XT’s max-quality 4K performance from 59fps to 86fps, though AMD’s upscaler still isn’t quite as sharp as Nvidia’s.
Ultrawide resolutions get some love as well. Not so much in cutscenes, which run at standard 16:9 widescreen with vertical black bars, but the actually playable part adapts ably to 21:9.
Stability-wise, all is well, and I haven’t bumped into any stuttering or buggy moments worth reporting. Even the load times seem a lot shorter than those of Valhalla, at least with Mirage installed on an SSD.
It ain’t half bad on the humble Steam Deck, either. At least, it isn’t once you can actually install it, as the lack of a Steam release means you’ll first need to cajole either Ubisoft Connect or the Epic Games Launcher into running on the SteamOS handheld. Once you’re in, though, Mirage takes instantly to the Deck’s gamepad-style controls, and it ticks along surprisingly well. I got 35fps on High quality, 42fps on Low, and 50fps with both Low and FSR 2 on Balanced.
As usual, mind, there are literally better options than the presets. Now that we’ve established Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s core competency on the tech side, it’s time to see how fine-tuning its settings can yield faster framerates still.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage best settings guide
The performance differences between each preset can vary; sometimes they’re significant, sometimes they’re invisible to the naked eye. The RTX 3070, the card I ended up using (at 1440p) for this setting-tweaking experiment, averaged 75fps on Ultra High, 80fps on Very High, 90fps on High, 94fps on Medium, and 102fps on Low.
Normally, these kinds of figures would have us looking for which settings to drop all the way to Low, as it clearly holds the most frames in reserve. However, since Mirage already performs well on old and weak hardware, I reckon this time we can aim higher and search for a combination of Ultra High, High and the occasional Medium setting. Besides, looking at the different quality levels in action, the drop from Medium to Low is especially steep:
Here’s every individual setting in Mirage’s selection, and how much they improve performance when lowered. Remember, we’re looking to improve on the all-Ultra High benchmark result of 75fps.
World details: I’d go for High here. This change alone bumped the RTX 3070 up to 82fps, just 1fps slower than Medium did, and although both options increase the occasional pop-in effect on environmental details, they’re more subtle on High.
Clutter density: Dropping this down to Medium produced a 77fps average, arguably not enough to justify the loss in visual richness and foliage quantity. Leave this on max, which for some reason is Very High rather than Ultra High.
Shadows: An easy cut, this. Medium quality is an acceptable step down from Ultra High, and singlehandedly raised RTX 3070 performance to 82fps.
Volumetric clouds: Like World details, dropping this can yield performance gains, but go too far and the detail loss isn’t worth it. I recommend settling for High, which nudged performance up to 78fps.
Water: Swapping High quality water for Low only increased my performance to 76fps, a measly 1fps gain, and those cooling Baghdad rivers look all the worse for it. Leave on High.
Screen space reflections: Disabling reflections only gave me an extra 2fps, so they’re probably best left switched on.
Environment textures: Medium textures produced another 77fps result, which isn’t enough to balance the quality loss. Stick to Ultra High, I say.
Character textures: An even less impactful setting than Environmental textures, with Medium barely ticking Mirage up to 76fps. Nah.
Depth of Field: This only effects the in-engine cutscenes. Which are numerous, to be sure, but lowering DoF quality won’t help the game run better when it really counts.
Motion blur: I got 78fps after flicking this off. A small change, but one you might as well take, as I can’t say the blur effect really adds anything.
Adaptive quality: Unless you’re trying to play Mirage on a PC from the Gordon Brown era, adaptive quality is best switched off. The maximum FPS you can target is 60fps, which most graphics cards in use today will hit regardless, and it overrides the Upsample type setting (AKA upscaling), which can improve performance more consistently.
Upsample type/Upsample quality: This covers both the trio of upscalers and TAA, the default anti-aliasing option. If your GPU supports it, the absolute best combination here is DLSS and Quality mode; this got my RTX 3070 up to 84fps, and since Balanced mode only raised that to 85fps, you may as well use the sharper-looking setting.
Out of the XeSS and FSR 2 alternatives, use XeSS Quality (83fps) if you want to maximise fidelity or FSR 2 Quality (87fps) if you’re chasing a more sizeable speed boost.
Sharpen strength: A slider for the sharpening effect included in the upscalers. Honestly, leaving this at the default 60% is fine. It doesn’t affect performance either way, and raising it too high makes the game look overly processed.
Of this already rather short options list, just a small handful prove capable of truly speeding up performance. Nevertheless, the improvement they provide is sizeable, and they’ll let you stay very close indeed to the complexity of Ultra High. Behold, the best settings for Assassin’s Creed Mirage:
- World details: High
- Shadows: Medium
- Volumetric clouds: High
- Motion blur: Off
- Adaptive quality: Off
- Everything else: Ultra High preset equivalent
With these, my RTX 3070-based PC upped its benchmark result from 75fps to 93fps, a healthy 24% improvement. DLSS Quality was worth using at 1440p, too, helping it up to 107fps.
The RTX 3070 is obviously a higher-end GPU than most, but these settings worked nicely on the Steam Deck as well. Replacing DLSS with FSR 2 on Quality mode, Valve’s handheld produced a more than playable 43fps, which is about as fast as the Low preset runs with TAA. And you get to keep most of the Ultra High settings! Bargain.