Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a huge deal, not only because it is the latest instalment in the legendary and long-running Assassin’s Creed franchise, but it’s also one of the few triple-A titles to be available on Mac on day one. Yup, it was available on Macs on the same day as it was released on PCs and consoles. This sort of thing doesn’t happen very often.
Naturally, some of you might be curious to know how it’ll run on Macs. Happily, Ubisoft has published a handy table showing what you need to achieve 30fps at various graphics settings and resolutions. Take a look at it below.
Mac requirements for Assassin's Creed Shadows. Photo: Ubisoft
However, you’ll notice that the absolute bare minimum to achieve 30fps at 720p with the graphics set to “Low” and software selective ray tracing, is with a Mac with M1 Ultra or M2 Pro and with 16GB of memory.
This got me thinking: can I get the game to run on a base-spec MacBook Air? Having recently reviewed the new M4 MacBook Air, I had one lying around to test this. Take a look at the results below.
Graphics setting: Low, Shader set to Quality | |
Resolution | Frame rate |
1280 x 800 | 21 |
1920 x 1200 | 16 |
Graphics setting: High, Shader set to Quality | |
Resolution | Frame rate |
1280 x 800 | 15 |
1920 x 1200 | 12 |
Graphics setting: Ultra-high, Shader set to Quality | |
Resolution | Frame rate |
1280 x 800 | 9 |
1920 x 1200 | 7 |
To be clear, this was achieved using a base-model MacBook Air. This means it has the M4 chip with 10 CPU cores and 8 GPU cores. It also has 16GB of memory, 256GB of storage, and costs S$1,499.
As you can see, even at the lowest resolution and at the lowest graphics setting, it's barely playable. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. It's not a great experience.
One thing to note is that unless you hook the MacBook Air up to an external display, 1280 x 800 is the lowest attainable resolution with the built-in display. Looking at the results, it’s doubtful that going lower to 1280 x 720 is going to help much, but maybe you want to squeeze out as many fps as possible.
Overall, the results are to be expected given that the MacBook Air is arguably the least powerful Mac you can buy and it wasn't designed to be a gaming machine. Not only does it have a basic M4 chip, but it also doesn’t have any form of active cooling—remember, it has a fan-less design.
What’s going to be really interesting to see is how the game will perform on other Macs like an M4 Max MacBook Pro or an M4 Pro Mac mini. Stay tuned for that.
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