When the wind hits in Assassins Creed Shadows the world feels alive. Leaves whip up into the air, grass dances back and forth, and Naoes hair sways from side to side. Its a stunning effect that enriches the games shifting seasonal and weather systems. According to a Digital Foundry interview with a few of the games rendering engineers, the wind isnt actually wind at all its invisible fluid.Thats right: All the realistic wind physics are actually made from a fluid simulation moving through the world. Its a common technique used in lots of games, and the math has given good effects in games as different as God of War and Dwarf Fortress. So why not here, too?The Ubisoft developers call Assassins Creed Shadows dynamic weather system Atmos, and it was created to support its seasonal theme. As Naoes revenge story oscillates between two periods of her life, the seasons shift too. You might be trudging through thick blankets of winter snow covering the Japanese countryside for one moment, and then sprinting through verdant fields after it all melts away in the next. Eventually, you can even change the seasons on command.Combined with its new ray-traced lighting effects, Assassins Creed Shadows might be one of the best looking games out there. For me, its certainly the first time ray tracing has ever felt essential for creating a mood and atmosphere that enriches the storytelling. Digital Foundrys video has the nitty gritty details, but basically the game injects ray tracing into older technology to more accurately light scenes. Shoji glows while youre standing inside buildings, and there are darker shadows on objects where the sunlight cant reach in the open world. With ray tracing off, all the contrast disappears and dulls the world. The experts at Digital Foundry call the difference a generational divide in lighting fidelity.Assassins Creed Shadows is the kind of game that makes a convincing argument for investing in a PlayStation 5 Pro or a gaming PC with a 50-series Nvidia graphics card. On the Pro, it can run at a smooth 60 frames per second with ray tracing enabled, and it will fully support Sonys PSSR upscaling technology in a future update. On PC, DLSS and Frame Generation can easily carry you to 60 fps on an RTX 4070 or newer.And youll benefit from all that horsepower because its not just the lighting. Its how dynamic features like the wind or being able to slice bamboo apart enhance the level of interactivity, or tactile feel of the world similar to what its like playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Asssassins Creed Shadows has set a new bar by using all the power of modern computing not for pure hyper-realism, but for creating a living, breathing world to inhabit.