Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has been officially released, however it appears that this latest open-world game from Ubisoft will not work on CPUs that do not support AVX. This basically means that the game will not launch at all if you are using an older Intel or AMD CPU that does not support it.

In case you weren’t aware of, AVX – Advanced Vector Extensions – are extensions to the x86 instruction set architecture for microprocessors from Intel and AMD. The first CPUs that support AVX are the second generation Intel Core Sandy Bridge processors and the AMD Bulldozer processors.

In short, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey will not work with these CPUs:

First generation Intel i3, i5, i7 processor or older (Eg. i7 920, i7 960, etc.)

Intel Pentium processors (Eg. G4560, G2030, etc.)

AMD Phenom processors (Eg. X6 1090T)

Now it’s worth noting that other PC games also had that requirement, however developers were able to patch their games in order to support older CPUs. Monster Hunter World was such a game, as were Ubisoft’s Steep and The Crew 2. However, Ubisoft may not release any patch to support older CPUs this time around.

On its official forum, Ubisoft has stated that it currently does not have any plans to support CPUs that lack support for the AVX extensions. According to reports, this may be due to the inclusion of the Denuvo anti-tamper tech so it will be interesting to see whether the game will run on such CPUs when – and if – it ever gets cracked. Unless of course Ubisoft updates the game in order to officially support these CPUs in a future patch.

UPDATE:

Ubisoft has issued an update on this issue, claiming that it is currently looking into extending the supported CPUs for those that do not support AVX (thanks 7thGuest2.0).

“We heard your feedback and are now actively working on a solution to extend the supported CPUs for our players to be able to run Assassin’s Creed Odyssey without AVX support, within the minimum requirements.

As this is an ongoing process, we are not able to provide an ETA just yet, but rest assured this is a high priority for us and we will keep you updated on the progress.”