Assassin’s Creed Shadows was close to having full ray tracing on Xbox Series S

Ubisoft reveals what was left out of Assassin's Creed Shadows on Series S.

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During its development, Assassin’s Creed Shadows came very close to offering full ray tracing on Xbox Series S, but it wasn’t a matter of brute power or technical viability of the engine. Instead, it was a more specific issue: available memory.

This information comes to light after an in-depth technical analysis published by Digital Foundry, which delved into the process of adapting the game to Switch 2. In that context, Ubisoft took the opportunity to reveal very revealing details about how the Series S version was worked on internally and what decisions were made in the final stretch of development.

Xbox Series S RAM: The Major Obstacle to Ray Tracing

According to Nicolas Lopez, technical rendering architect at Ubisoft, the global illumination with ray tracing (RTGI) system worked perfectly in the game’s world on Xbox Series S. The problem wasn’t with overall performance, but with the memory consumption associated with this technology.

RTGI worked perfectly in the world, but we had very little memory. It was quite frustrating, to be honest.

The lack of RAM margin forced the team to remove ray tracing from the final version, keeping it only in a very specific area of the game (a hiding spot) as a technical compromise to be able to close the project in stable conditions.

• This type of decision is not new in the current generation. Ray tracing is one of the most demanding features in terms of resources, and Xbox Series S is often the system where the most cuts are applied to ensure stability and adequate loading times. Nevertheless, the fact is especially interesting: Assassin’s Creed Shadows did run with full RTGI on Series S during development.

The final result makes it clear that the console had technical margin, but not enough memory to sustain it in such an ambitious open-world game. A reminder of how the balance between performance, visual quality, and resources continues to shape the current versions of major releases.