GDC 2025 Session Viewer

Assassin's Creed Shadows is a large systemic open world game with dynamic time of day cycles, a systemic weather system, and seasons. it is the first next gen only Assassin's Creed game. It's built on the next gen iteration of the Anvil engine and is the first Assassin's Creed game to feature Ray Traced Global Illumination. Such a large world and dynamic setting poses many rendering challenges. The talk focuses on a typical frame and walks the audience through the various steps required to produce the final render, focusing on gpu driven pipeline, lighting improvements and other new developments. It concludes with optimization strategies and best practices for open world games.

Takeaway

Attendees can learn how the world of Assassin's Creed Shadows is built and rendered. After this session, attendees should have a good understanding on how the Anvil engine renders a massive amount of geometry and instances, and how it was improved to renders such a dynamic world with a scalable lighting pipeline.

Intended Audience

This talk targets graphics programmers, technical directors and technical artists. Intermediate to advanced rendering knowledge is required. The audience should be confortable with physically based rendering, and modern graphics API concepts.