Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag Resynced Launches July 9 on PS5 and PS5 Pro
More than a decade after its original debut, Edward Kenway’s high-seas adventure is returning to modern hardware. Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag Resynced launches on July 9 for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro, bringing a significant technical overhaul to the fan-favorite title.
Rather than a standard remaster, the development team has rebuilt the experience from the ground up using the latest iteration of the Anvil engine. This update introduces modern features including 60 FPS support, HDR, Dolby Atmos, and DualSense haptic feedback. According to the development team, the goal was to modernize every system while maintaining the identity of the original release.
Ray Tracing and a Dynamic World
The Caribbean has been reimagined with a fully dynamic, hardware-accelerated ray tracing system. By moving away from precomputed lighting, the game now reacts in real time to the environment, weather, and time of day. Ray-traced diffuse lighting provides natural color bleeding and consistent shading, while specular reflections on surfaces like wet wood and ocean spray aim to create a more grounded physical presence.
Ray-Traced Global Illumination is standard across all graphics modes on both PS5 and PS5 Pro. Players on the PS5 Pro gain additional advantages, with ray-traced specular reflections enabled across all modes, whereas these are limited to Balanced and Fidelity modes on the base PS5.
Micropolygon Geometry and Atmos Weather
To eliminate the visual "popping" often associated with traditional level-of-detail rendering, Black Flag Resynced utilizes a micropolygon geometry pipeline. This system leverages the PlayStation 5’s ultra-high-speed SSD to stream and render geometric clusters that refine continuously based on camera perspective and distance.
This technical shift is paired with "Atmos," the engine's systemic weather simulation framework. Instead of static effects, the game now simulates variables like humidity, wind, temperature, and vapor density in real time. These factors interact directly with the world, impacting cloth, vegetation, ship sails, and character hair.
PS5 Pro Specific Features
The PlayStation 5 Pro version offers additional headroom for performance and fidelity. Beyond the expanded ray tracing support, the PS5 Pro introduces strand-based hair simulation for Edward in all graphics modes. In Fidelity mode, this technology extends to nearby crowd characters during gameplay, with cinematics utilizing strand-based hair for all characters regardless of the chosen mode.
Furthermore, the PS5 Pro version utilizes PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) to improve image reconstruction and quality. This helps bridge the gap between performance and fidelity targets, ensuring a more stable experience across the board.
Whether you are revisiting the Caribbean or setting sail for the first time, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag Resynced aims to deliver a modernized take on the classic open-world pirate adventure when it arrives on July 9.