Having trouble running Assassins Creed 4: Black Flag on your PC? We have a small troubleshooting guide on what things you can do to improve performance. For the record, these tweaks were made on a PC with a 4.0 Ghz i7 and GTX 580.
You should now that the game does not cap at 30 FPS. Rather, it uses a conventional v-sync that will try to go 60 FPS and above, and at the very least will not go below 30 FPS.
Start by testing out environment quality. There’s a big difference between settings 3 and 4, with 4 rumored to bring minor tessellation. Drop it down to 3 and framerate should improve.
After that, you’ll want to lower antialiasing. The thing with antialiasing is you won’t even notice the difference if you do lower it. Lastly, you can move soft shadows to regular shadows set to high. These changes will fix framerate.
If you are still not satisfied, you can then touch Volumetric Fog and Ambient Occlusion, but be forewarned, these also add considerable benefits to the game. Reflections makes the water look stunning, but also strikes down framerate performance.
If you are still getting game freezes, it is because the game generally eats up video cards. This is a situation where overclocking is a detriment, because if the card can’t handle it, it’ll freeze completely while music plays and you will not be able to easily shut it down. In this case, you should try raising the voltage on the card.
Lastly, if you are an nVidia user, you can try going to the nVidia panel to turn on triple buffering and adaptive vsync, or if that doesn’t work, turn it off altogether.
