Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced best graphics settings depend heavily on your GPU, since the game does not scale evenly across every option. This guide breaks down which settings actually matter, which ones you can safely lower, and how to pick the right setup whether you’re chasing visuals or frame rate.
TL;DR
- Ray tracing costs less than expected and is worth using on capable GPUs
- Water, shadows, terrain, and clouds matter most for visual quality
- Post effects, fog density, and terrain texture can be lowered with little visual loss
- Use DLSS on RTX cards, FSR on Radeon, and XeSS on Intel Arc
- Frame generation works best once you already hit 50-60 FPS naturally
- Texture quality depends on your VRAM, not just your GPU tier
How Graphics Settings Work in Black Flag Resynced
Black Flag Resynced runs on an upgraded version of Ubisoft’s Anvil engine, the same technology behind Assassin’s Creed Shadows. It supports both hardware and software ray tracing, virtualized geometry rendering known as micropolygon, dynamic weather, and full support for modern upscaling and frame generation tools. The game includes a large number of individual graphics settings, but not all of them affect performance equally. Some settings barely move the needle, while a handful have a real impact on both visuals and frame rate. Knowing which is which makes tuning your settings far easier.
One thing worth knowing upfront: many settings in this game require a restart or checkpoint reload to apply, and there are no live previews while adjusting sliders. Plan to test changes in short sessions rather than tweaking mid-mission.
Best Ray Tracing Settings
Ray Tracing Mode is the single most important setting in the game, since it changes how lighting and reflections are calculated rather than just adjusting a quality slider. With it enabled, you get more natural indirect lighting and fuller reflections across the Caribbean. The performance hit is smaller than you’d expect for an open-world title, with global illumination costing roughly 8 to 10 percent of your frame rate and reflections adding another 7 to 8 percent.
- Ray Tracing Mode: Extended for capable GPUs, Off if you need maximum frame rate or have a weaker card
- Ray Tracing Quality: Medium offers the best balance between cleanliness and cost
- BVH Quality: Ultra High, since lowering it barely helps performance but does hurt reflection accuracy
If your GPU can’t handle ray tracing smoothly, turning it off entirely gives a much bigger performance boost than lowering it to a lower quality tier.
Best Upscaling and Frame Generation Settings
Your upscaler choice should match your GPU brand rather than personal preference, since each one is tuned differently.
- NVIDIA RTX owners: Use DLSS Super Resolution for the sharpest image reconstruction
- AMD Radeon owners: Use FSR, ideally the newer ML-based version on RX 7000 and RX 9000 series cards
- Intel Arc owners: Use XeSS Super Resolution
- Older or non-RTX NVIDIA cards: Try both XeSS and the built-in TAA solution to see which looks cleaner on your setup
Frame generation is also supported across all three vendors, but it should never be used to fix a low base frame rate. Get your gameplay to a stable 50-60 FPS first, then enable frame generation for smoother motion on high refresh-rate monitors.
Settings Worth Keeping High
These options have a noticeable visual impact and are worth prioritizing, even if it means lowering something else to compensate.
- Water Quality: High. Water is central to a pirate game, so this shouldn’t be cut too far
- Shadow Quality: High. Keeps jungles, cities, and outdoor scenes from looking flat
- Cloud Quality: Ultra High. Lower settings noticeably thin out the sky and hurt immersion
- Terrain Quality: Ultra High. Lower tiers didn’t meaningfully improve frame rate in testing
- Character Quality: Very High. Matters a lot given how many NPCs and story scenes you’ll encounter
- Particles Quality: Very High. Naval combat, storms, and explosions rely heavily on this
Settings You Can Safely Lower
These options either have a small visual impact or a disproportionate performance cost, making them the first place to look when you need extra frame rate.
- Post Effects: Very Low. Removes motion blur and chromatic aberration for a cleaner image, though this is partly a taste preference
- Loading Distance: Medium. Higher settings barely improve distant visibility relative to their cost
- Light Source Quality: Medium. Mostly affects night scenes and doesn’t need to be pushed higher
- Screen Space Effects: Medium. A reasonable middle ground for ambient occlusion and reflections
- Deformation: Medium. Subtle visual difference during normal gameplay
- Terrain Texture Quality: Medium. Doesn’t meaningfully affect VRAM usage, so there’s little reason to max it out
Texture Quality and VRAM
Texture Resolution Quality is one of the more VRAM-sensitive settings in the game, but the good news is that Black Flag Resynced is efficient compared to most modern open-world titles. At native 1440p, Very High and Ultra High textures use around 10GB of VRAM, while High and below stay closer to 8GB. If your card has 10GB or more, go with Very High or Ultra High. If you’re on an 8GB card, stick with High to avoid stutter from VRAM overflow, especially if you’re also running ray tracing or playing at 4K.
Recommended Setup by GPU Tier
If you’re not sure where to start, here’s a general approach based on your hardware. For a full breakdown of minimum, recommended, and extreme hardware tiers, see our Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced PC requirements guide.
- Entry-level GPUs (GTX 1660, RX 5500 XT class): Keep ray tracing off, use your vendor’s upscaler on Balanced or Performance mode, and stick to Medium settings across the board
- Mid-range GPUs (RTX 3060, RX 6600 XT class): Ray tracing off or Standard, upscaler on Quality mode, keep water and shadows on High
- High-end GPUs (RTX 3080, RX 6800 XT class): Ray tracing Extended, follow the optimized settings list above for the best visuals-to-performance balance
- Enthusiast GPUs (RTX 4090, RX 7900 XTX class): Push texture quality to Ultra High, keep ray tracing Extended, and enable frame generation if you’re targeting a high refresh-rate display
Should You Play With or Without Ray Tracing?
If your GPU supports hardware ray tracing and can maintain a stable frame rate with it enabled, it’s genuinely worth using here. Unlike many games where ray tracing adds a small visual bump for a massive performance cost, Black Flag Resynced keeps the cost fairly reasonable while noticeably improving indirect lighting and reflections. Mid-range GPU owners, or anyone chasing very high frame rates, will still get a strong-looking game with ray tracing off, since the base art direction carries a lot of the visual weight on its own.
If you’re still deciding on hardware or want to double check your system meets the requirements for these settings, check our full PC requirements breakdown before adjusting your graphics options.
