
Skull and Bones is Ubisoft’s latest multiplayer/coop pirate simulator inspired by Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. The game features a massive open-world set during Medieval times in the Indian Ocean and its pirate sanctuaries. We’ll have a separate game review up in the coming days, but for now, let’s analyze the PC performance across the latest NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards.
Test Bench
- CPU: Intel Core i9-13900K
- Cooler: Lian Li Galahad 360
- Motherboard: ASUS ROG Z790 Maximus Hero
- Memory: DDR5 16GB x2 @ 6000MT/s CL30
- Power Supply: Corsair RM1000e
Graphics Quality Settings
Skull and Bones is an average-looking game but performs well on most PC configurations. It features five graphics presets: Low, Medium, High, Very High, and Ultra. Ray-traced global illumination is enabled at the Very High and Ultra presets, significantly impacting quality and performance. At 4K Ultra (native), the game averages 95 FPS on the GeForce RTX 4090. Disabling ray-tracing increases the frame rate to 110 FPS, a modest drop if you ask me.

Going from Ultra to High, the performance drop is the same recorded when toggling RTGI. The difference in visual fidelity also boils down to the lighting. The more complex ambient shadows disappear and are replaced by rasterized ambient occlusion.





Going from High to Medium removes high-detail waves (tesselation?) while also culling the vegetation quality of the forests in the distance. Texture quality is reduced, as is the LOD. Further reducing the quality to Low eliminates ambient occlusion, the finer details of vegetation, and other special effects.
Skull and Bones features TAA, TAA-based upscaling, DLSS, and FSR. Strangely, TAA native looks worse than TAA “Quality.” We suggest sticking to DLSS or FSR 2 “Quality” for the best results.
Skull and Bones GPU Benchmarks
Skull and Bones runs well across all resolutions, averaging 95 FPS at 4K Ultra on the GeForce RTX 4090. The RTX 4080 Super posts 79 FPS, while the 4070 nets nearly 52 FPS. AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XT is capable delivers playable 4K performance, with an average of 61.7 FPS. The RTX 4060 ends last with an average framerate of 34.6 FPS. The 1% lows of all GPUs are within acceptable limits.

At 1440p, the RTX 4090 gets bumped up to 140 FPS, up from 119.5 FPS on the RTX 4080 Super. The Radeon RX 7900 XT falls short of the 100 FPS mark, with 1% lows of 67.4 FPS. The RTX 4070 and 4060 yield 88 FPS and 57 FPS, respectively.

At 1080p, the GPUs run into varying levels of CPU bottlenecks. The RTX 4090 nets 156.7 FPS, just 17 FPS more than at 1440p. The RTX 4080 Super manages 143 FPS, while the RX 7900 XT posts 114 FPS. Even the RTX 4070 crosses the 100 FPS mark at 1080p, while the 4060 ends with 75 FPS.

The NVIDIA GPUs have relatively smoother performance than their AMD counterparts, with consistent frame-pacing and fewer inter-frame stutters. The Radeon RX 7900 XT faces greater frametime variance than the RTX 4070 and 4080 Super.

Conclusion
Overall, Skull and Bones runs better on NVIDIA graphics cards. They’re more power efficient and run cooler as well. For example, the RTX 4090 peaked at 308W with a maximum recorded temperature of 64C. The Radeon RX 7900 XT (despite being slower) sipped up to 340W of power with an average temperature of 71C.