Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
The first “next gen” game (although it’s more “cross gen” than anything) is Assassins’ Creed IV: Black Flag. This uses a version of the AnvilNext engine, with some extra effects that were added to accommodate the power of next-gen consoles.
Our Assassin’s Creed IV benchmark run consists of a run through the city of Havana when you first start the game. We tried to keep a consistent path between benchmark runs. To make sure, we ran each benchmark path 5 times and picked one of the more consistent results.



Assassin’s Creed IV Frame Times
Assassin’s Creed IV Time Spent Over x
This is a huge result – it wasn’t until we used a Haswell core CPU that the R9 280X was able to deliver consistent frame times and a 60 FPS frame rate in Assassin’s Creed IV. All three AMD CPUs we used – even the FX 8350 – and the Ivy Bridge Core i3 would deliver a sub 60 FPS frame rate, with frame spikes throughout the benchmark run.
In this case, the Core i3 4340 allows the R9 280X GPU to run at maximum potential, just like the Core i5 (and Core i7 would).
Next we’ll look at another modern “cross gen” game, Battlefield 4, and see if this trend continues.





