Assassin's Creed patch will remove DX10.1 support

Of course, DX10.1 is supported primarily in ATI's Radeon 3000-class GPUs, with Nvidia choosing to eschew support for the most part, claiming that there was nothing important to be missed.

But a new graphical analysis of the game running under DX10.1, which you can see over at HardOCP here, has shown that there is actually a large performance boost to be had from a couple of the more efficient rendering algorithms in the updated spec. Author Mark Warner called the boost 'significant', pumping the frame rate up by as much as 20% with anti-aliasing enabled - although with no discernable improvement in image quality.

However, Ubisoft says that the performance gain is due to a bug in the rendering process - despite there being no visible difference in image quality - and will be promptly removing 10.1 support from the game in an upcoming patch. This seems rather non-sensical when image quality is good and there are performance improvements to be had. There is no suggestion from Ubi that there is any instability here - they are simply taking a performance boost for Radeon cards and removing it.

HardOCP's own Kyle Bennett makes what is sure to be an interesting point: Assassin's Creed is an Nvidia 'The Way It's Meant To Be Played' title, and the firm has almost certainly invested a few dollars in making sure the PC port runs well on Green Team graphics boards.