The folks over at Digital Foundry have today put out an extensive piece on the making of Assassin's Creed Shadows for Switch 2, and with Xbox Series S most closely resembling Nintendo's hybrid system, we thought we'd have a quick look for anything relevant in here — and a quote from Ubisoft gives us some interesting insight into the Series S version of the game.
When discussing RTGI (ray traced global illumination) and its removal from these lower-spec versions of AC Shadows, the game's Rendering Technical Architect Nicolas Lopez said that "it [RTGI] was running perfectly in the world" on Series S, but the team was "very short on memory". So, when it came to "shipping" the final version, they had to ditch the taxing technology aside from one section (a hideout zone) to get the game out the door.
"It was a bit raging, to be honest, but we were very short on memory."
It's a shame that the team didn't have more time to properly optimise this feature on Series S, because it sounds like the machine would have been capable, but it's hardly surprising. Ray tracing is expensive tech performance-wise, and we've seen plenty of games skimp on it for the cheaper current-gen Xbox, or at least cut it down to a lesser version.
Still, when we looked at DF's more direct AC Shadows comparison for Series S and Switch 2 last month, the Xbox machine clearly came out on top both visually and in terms of performance, so maybe it was best to drop ray traced global illumination here. The latest Assassin's Creed has a big old open world powered by modern Ubisoft tech, and it performs pretty darn well on Series S — just without the RTGI features of its big brother.