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Watch Dogs 2 PC performance thread

Has anyone encountered the dense fog that was shown in the nvidia video of watch dogs 2? I've been playing for 10 hours now and never seen it. Saw some generic looking fog but thats about it. Didnt look very special. The setting is enabled.

Maybe it's like that option in The Curse of Monkey Island:

1087166805-00s6bmo.gif


Anyway, everytime I think I found the best settings with this game my system gets humiliated over and over. I just began the "red room" mission mission and in that point, with lots of trees and vegetation, fps took a huge hit, even without nvidia shadows. A this point I really don't know how to make this game run properly without sacrificing every detail which makes it look good.
 
Something weird happened to this game today. I felt like it was slightly smoother after the patch, keeping me at a near steady 60 fps in 1440p on my GTX 1080 and settings above Ultra with Temporal Filtering turned on. It's been pretty steady since the game came out, never dropping me too far below 60.

Then the game crashed today after half an hour of playing it (I blame the latest Geforce drivers which have made my system very crash prone). One reboot later, and my framerate was halved. I've checked and double-checked the game's video settings, and everything is where it should be. Temporal Filtering is still turned on too. I've rebooted several times, and I've done a clean install of the Geforce drivers. Nothing helps. The game stays barely above 30 now, and I can't see any reason why.

I've checked my card's values in MSI Afterburner while playing too. Nothing seems out of place there either. Temperature, clock speed, it's all the way it should be.

Am I alone in having this issue?
 
Something weird happened to this game today. I felt like it was slightly smoother after the patch, keeping me at a near steady 60 fps in 1440p on my GTX 1080 and settings above Ultra with Temporal Filtering turned on. It's been pretty steady since the game came out, never dropping me too far below 60.

Then the game crashed today after half an hour of playing it (I blame the latest Geforce drivers which have made my system very crash prone). One reboot later, and my framerate was halved. I've checked and double-checked the game's video settings, and everything is where it should be. Temporal Filtering is still turned on too. I've rebooted several times, and I've done a clean install of the Geforce drivers. Nothing helps. The game stays barely above 30 now, and I can't see any reason why.

I've checked my card's values in MSI Afterburner while playing too. Nothing seems out of place there either. Temperature, clock speed, it's all the way it should be.

Am I alone in having this issue?

Crashed for me today as well, a display driver crash to be exact. Check your eventviewer under Warnings/Display to see if that caused your crash. You could also check your reliability history for a ''hardware error''.

Reinstalled latest driver with DDU, but can't say i notice anything like your issue. FPS does drop way below 60 if i'm on top of huge buildings looking over the city or in the western part of the map with all the trees. Those are real performance killers.
 
I'm playing the game on a GTX 1070, running max settings and getting over 60 fps. I actually capped it at 60 fps though.

After an hour or so, now that I'm running around the city on my own, I'm getting bad spikes of stuttering, frame drops, and complete pausing for a few seconds. I've heard people say they had this issue on consoles and that disabling online modes fixed it, is this an issue on PC as well? Anyone else?

EDIT: Gave it another few minutes. Man, it's pretty freaking constant. Driving is real difficult because of it.

EDIT 2: Ok so when I auto-detected it put me at Ultra in the tutorial. Now that I'm in the open world it is running like shit and auto-detect puts me at High. Damn, I thought the GTX 1070 should be able to beast this game. Maybe my CPU isn't up to snuff, but I'm running Gears 4 at Ultra 60 fps.

EDIT 3: Dropped to the High settings as recommended, and I'm STILL only getting 45 fps and it stutters and drops. I'm beginning to think it isn't my PC, and it's this game.
 
I've noticed in downtown SF my CPU threads are routinely hovering around 85℅ or so and even spending time maxed out at 100℅ on all four cores on my 2500K which is OC to 4.5Ghz. What are some settings to focus on turning down that would alleviate the CPU stress? So far I out textures down to high and have the fog and screen space reflections off.

Think this is the first game that has actually maxed out all of the cores for my CPU.
 
I've noticed in downtown SF my CPU threads are routinely hovering around 85℅ or so and even spending time maxed out at 100℅ on all four cores on my 2500K which is OC to 4.5Ghz. What are some settings to focus on turning down that would alleviate the CPU stress? So far I out textures down to high and have the fog and screen space reflections off.

Think this is the first game that has actually maxed out all of the cores for my CPU.

in general LOD settings are what affect your cpu. so turn down geometry and extra details. maybe terrain too
 
I've finally gotten my settings right where its close enough to 60fps that I'm happy...

Until the patch.

I haven't been able to get into the game. It will launch, get me into the main menu, I'll click continue and it will start loading, the bar will fill all the way, and it will boot me back to desktop.

No crash report, no error, nothing.

I've tried reinstalling drivers, stop all overclocking, reinstalling the game, nothing works. I have no idea what to do now..
 
I'm playing the game on a GTX 1070, running max settings and getting over 60 fps. I actually capped it at 60 fps though.

After an hour or so, now that I'm running around the city on my own, I'm getting bad spikes of stuttering, frame drops, and complete pausing for a few seconds. I've heard people say they had this issue on consoles and that disabling online modes fixed it, is this an issue on PC as well? Anyone else?

EDIT: Gave it another few minutes. Man, it's pretty freaking constant. Driving is real difficult because of it.

EDIT 2: Ok so when I auto-detected it put me at Ultra in the tutorial. Now that I'm in the open world it is running like shit and auto-detect puts me at High. Damn, I thought the GTX 1070 should be able to beast this game. Maybe my CPU isn't up to snuff, but I'm running Gears 4 at Ultra 60 fps.

EDIT 3: Dropped to the High settings as recommended, and I'm STILL only getting 45 fps and it stutters and drops. I'm beginning to think it isn't my PC, and it's this game.
When you see a performance thread with many pages, it means the game runs like shit. :D I wonder how the game ran so good in that nvidia trailer, probably they sped it up.

Regarding the stuttering while driving, try to lower texture one step below ultra.
 
i think we are at the point in which you kinda need a recent quadcore to 60fps modern open world stuff regardless of gpu.


is hyperthreading used in games yet?
 
When you see a performance thread with many pages, it means the game runs like shit. :D I wonder how the game ran so good in that nvidia trailer, probably they sped it up.

Wasn't the trailer at 30fps ? Most games have no issues running maxed out at 30 on a good PC, it's 60 they have issues with (see Forza Horizon 3)
 
^ Honestly I don't know. When the game runs at 15-20 fps there's no cap which can help though.

i think we are at the point in which you kinda need a recent quadcore to 60fps modern open world stuff regardless of gpu.


is hyperthreading used in games yet?

It kinda helps to get better low and mid fps but it's not enough with WD2. I have a oc'ed 6700k and performance is bad. There are a few areas where the framerate takes a noticeable hit.
 
the amount of stuttering i'm getting is insane. the framerate isn't dropping so maybe it's the frame pacing or something? my cpu is a 6700K at 4.5, 2666 16GB DDR4, gtx 1070. seems to be mostly when driving fast around the city.
 
the amount of stuttering i'm getting is insane. the framerate isn't dropping so maybe it's the frame pacing or something? my cpu is a 6700K at 4.5, 2666 16GB DDR4, gtx 1070. seems to be mostly when driving fast around the city.

Ubisoft open world games are notorious for stuttering
 
I think people really need to start posting their cpus when reporting about bad game performance, because things like: game runs bad on my 'insert high-end-gpu' doesn't mean much anymore.
But in a way I get it, CPU power was mostly irrelevant for a very long time. The 2500k is now nearly 6 years old and it is still good enough for many games (overclocked), but at the same time CPU requirements seems to rise extremely fast (real requirements, not the nonsense printed on boxes), especially in open world games.
Watch Dogs 2 is a new high when it comes to CPU power. This thing can max out a 6700k (4.5ghz). I recently used a crane to reach a paint job location and wondered why my cpu fan suddenly spiked...


That's of course an extreme example, but 70%+ per thread while driving at high speed through the city is pretty normal.

Is this kind of CPU hunger justified? Buildings in the 'crane scene' look very detailed to me and afaik high LOD and draw distance were always stressful for cpus, but I'm just a pc hobbyist and not a coding expert, so I can't really judge that. I'm also not defending WD2 here, system requirements are extremely high and I really hoped to have some headroom (3 years at least) with a 6700 when I bought it 8 months ago. I never expected it to be nearly maxed out by the end of 2016.

But I don't want to complain to much here, I just want to motivate people to start posting CPU specs alongside their gpus when reporting about performance.
 
I think people really need to start posting their cpus when reporting about bad game performance, because things like: game runs bad on my 'insert high-end-gpu' doesn't mean much anymore.
But in a way I get it, CPU power was mostly irrelevant for a very long time. The 2500k is now nearly 6 years old and it is still good enough for many games (overclocked), but at the same time CPU requirements seems to rise extremely fast (real requirements, not the nonsense printed on boxes), especially in open world games.
Watch Dogs 2 is a new high when it comes to CPU power. This thing can max out a 6700k (4.5ghz). I recently used a crane to reach a paint job location and wondered why my cpu fan suddenly spiked...



That's of course an extreme example, but 70%+ per thread while driving at high speed through the city is pretty normal.

Is this kind of CPU hunger justified? Buildings in the 'crane scene' look very detailed to me and afaik high LOD and draw distance were always stressful for cpus, but I'm just a pc hobbyist and not a coding expert, so I can't really judge that. I'm also not defending WD2 here, system requirements are extremely high.

I just want to motivate people to start posting CPU specs alongside their gpus when reporting about performance.

but it runs at 30 fps on console cpu. 60 should be a cake walk for an intel quad
 
but it runs at 30 fps on console cpu. 60 should be a cake walk for an intel quad

Yeah that makes sense to me and I'm not going to argue here or defend WD2 (mostly because the game seems over demanding to me). Granted I have no idea how view distance or LOD is on PS4 compared to PC, but that's also not my point. My point is: Please post your cpus when reporting on performance, because times are changing and CPU power is more relevant today than let's say 1.5 years ago.
 
but it runs at 30 fps on console cpu. 60 should be a cake walk for an intel quad

It is, on console settings. People tend to pump shit up to the maximum and then complain how their CPUs are at 100% all the time. Most of LODs being pushed to their limits will eat up CPU for breakfast, especially as this is a DX11 game so all the limits on draw calls apply hear.
 
It is, on console settings. People tend to pump shit up to the maximum and then complain how their CPUs are at 100% all the time. Most of LODs being pushed to their limits will eat up CPU for breakfast, especially as this is a DX11 game so all the limits on draw calls apply hear.

To be fair I haven't seen one single DX12 game to improve performance so far.
Maybe sometimes on weaker amd cpus, but nothing on intels 'high' end stuff.
 
To be fair I haven't seen one single DX12 game to improve performance so far.
Maybe sometimes on weaker amd cpus, but nothing on intels 'high' end stuff.

DX11 will choke at some point even on Intel+NV. An example:

YzQosGl.png


That's the reason why DX12 was necessary anyway, it's just that most current implementations are straight marketing efforts which have no technical reasoning.
 
It is, on console settings. People tend to pump shit up to the maximum and then complain how their CPUs are at 100% all the time. Most of LODs being pushed to their limits will eat up CPU for breakfast, especially as this is a DX11 game so all the limits on draw calls apply hear.

the problem is happening for people with extra detail at 0%
 
DX11 will choke at some point even on Intel+NV. An example:

YzQosGl.png


That's the reason why DX12 was necessary anyway, it's just that most current implementations are straight marketing efforts which have no technical reasoning.

Ashes of Singularity is a huge exception, maybe because it was always planned to use dx12 or maybe because it is a pc exclusive and the devs can concentrate on just one platform. idk.

There is also Gears 4, which seems to run fine, but we also can't compare dx11 vs dx12 performance there. So...

And yes, your last sentence seems to be accurate.
 
It is, on console settings. People tend to pump shit up to the maximum and then complain how their CPUs are at 100% all the time. Most of LODs being pushed to their limits will eat up CPU for breakfast, especially as this is a DX11 game so all the limits on draw calls apply hear.

No. streaming doesn't allow smooth 16.666 ms frametimes in a lot of situations. Streaming tech doesn't scale correctly for high end PCs.
 
I think people really need to start posting their cpus when reporting about bad game performance, because things like: game runs bad on my 'insert high-end-gpu' doesn't mean much anymore.
But in a way I get it, CPU power was mostly irrelevant for a very long time. The 2500k is now nearly 6 years old and it is still good enough for many games (overclocked), but at the same time CPU requirements seems to rise extremely fast (real requirements, not the nonsense printed on boxes), especially in open world games.
Watch Dogs 2 is a new high when it comes to CPU power. This thing can max out a 6700k (4.5ghz). I recently used a crane to reach a paint job location and wondered why my cpu fan suddenly spiked...



That's of course an extreme example, but 70%+ per thread while driving at high speed through the city is pretty normal.

Is this kind of CPU hunger justified? Buildings in the 'crane scene' look very detailed to me and afaik high LOD and draw distance were always stressful for cpus, but I'm just a pc hobbyist and not a coding expert, so I can't really judge that. I'm also not defending WD2 here, system requirements are extremely high and I really hoped to have some headroom (3 years at least) with a 6700 when I bought it 8 months ago. I never expected it to be nearly maxed out by the end of 2016.

But I don't want to complain to much here, I just want to motivate people to start posting CPU specs alongside their gpus when reporting about performance.

CPUs may show 90-100% usage but that doesn't mean the CPU is literally maxed out, it could and usually does have more to give, I've seen this a lot in GTA V.
How you can tell if you're truly CPU limited is if your GPU usage is below 95-99%

One thing you could try is changing the CPU affinity in Task Manager to only use 4 cores, that would be "CPU 0-3" for quad core i7 processors, you could even disable hyper-threading in the bios as this could give you a better idea of how it would perform on a 4 core processor.

If you use Task Manager to disable the threads then you would be able to see how the game scales from 4 to 8 threads while it's running, if your GPU usage is notably lower as you disable the cores/threads then the game is scaling past 4 threads, you could then check the performance increase from enabling each one.

It would be really good to see this performs with a 6 or 8 core processor, as you could see how it scales from 4-8 cores, and even the logical processors from hyper-threading.

EDIT: I was wrong about the CPU affinity, I think it should be core 0, 2, 4 and 6 for the 4 cores of a quad core i7, I sincerely apologies for any confusion caused.

I think people really need to start posting their cpus when reporting about bad game performance, because things like: game runs bad on my 'insert high-end-gpu' doesn't mean much anymore.
But in a way I get it, CPU power was mostly irrelevant for a very long time. The 2500k is now nearly 6 years old and it is still good enough for many games (overclocked), but at the same time CPU requirements seems to rise extremely fast (real requirements, not the nonsense printed on boxes), especially in open world games.
Watch Dogs 2 is a new high when it comes to CPU power. This thing can max out a 6700k (4.5ghz). I recently used a crane to reach a paint job location and wondered why my cpu fan suddenly spiked...



That's of course an extreme example, but 70%+ per thread while driving at high speed through the city is pretty normal.

Is this kind of CPU hunger justified? Buildings in the 'crane scene' look very detailed to me and afaik high LOD and draw distance were always stressful for cpus, but I'm just a pc hobbyist and not a coding expert, so I can't really judge that. I'm also not defending WD2 here, system requirements are extremely high and I really hoped to have some headroom (3 years at least) with a 6700 when I bought it 8 months ago. I never expected it to be nearly maxed out by the end of 2016.

But I don't want to complain to much here, I just want to motivate people to start posting CPU specs alongside their gpus when reporting about performance.

CPUs may show 90-100% usage but that doesn't mean the CPU is literally maxed out, it could and usually does have more to give, I've seen this a lot in GTA V.
How you can tell if you're truly CPU limited is if your GPU usage is below 95-99%

One thing you could try is changing the CPU affinity in Task Manager to only use 4 cores, that would be "CPU 0-3" for quad core i7 processors, you could even disable hyper-threading in the bios as this could give you a better idea of how it would perform on a 4 core processor.

If you use Task Manager to disable the threads then you would be able to see how the game scales from 4 to 8 threads while it's running, if your GPU usage is notably lower as you disable the cores/threads then the game is scaling past 4 threads, you could then check the performance increase from enabling each one.

It would be really good to see this performs with a 6 or 8 core processor, as you could see how it scales from 4-8 cores, and even the logical processors from hyper-threading.

EDIT: I was wrong about the CPU affinity, I think it should be core 0, 2, 4 and 6 for the 4 cores of a quad core i7, I sincerely apologies for any confusion caused.

EDIT2: I'm not even sure about which cores are physical anymore.
 
Something weird happened to this game today. I felt like it was slightly smoother after the patch, keeping me at a near steady 60 fps in 1440p on my GTX 1080 and settings above Ultra with Temporal Filtering turned on. It's been pretty steady since the game came out, never dropping me too far below 60.

Then the game crashed today after half an hour of playing it (I blame the latest Geforce drivers which have made my system very crash prone). One reboot later, and my framerate was halved. I've checked and double-checked the game's video settings, and everything is where it should be. Temporal Filtering is still turned on too. I've rebooted several times, and I've done a clean install of the Geforce drivers. Nothing helps. The game stays barely above 30 now, and I can't see any reason why.

I've checked my card's values in MSI Afterburner while playing too. Nothing seems out of place there either. Temperature, clock speed, it's all the way it should be.

Am I alone in having this issue?

I'm having a similar problem, the game was running at a fairly stable 1080p/60fps for me (on a GTX Titan X) up until this morning on very high+ setttings, even after I installed the latest patch.
This morning it suddenly feels choppy as hell and I'm seeing drops to ~40 fps. I tried playing with the settings for an hour, dropping to as low as medium and I still have the same issue. I need to investigate further but I have a feeling the CPU usage has gotten even worse after the patch.

EDIT: Ok, so it wasn't the game's fault. For some reason the Plex server on my machine decided to constantly hog 35% percent of my CPU even though I wasn't using it at the moment, and even after restarting the PC. I uninstalled it and now the game runs as before.
 
Something I've observed is that with temporal filtering on cpu use climbs by 20%-30% per thread. Because of this it's possible that some users with an older cpu but newer powerful gpu could get more balanced performance by not using temporal filtering. Obviously this incurs a huge performance hit to begin with, and I don't have the hardware set up right now to test this. But it's worth a try if you have an i5, or an older i7. The results would be interesting.
 
I've noticed in downtown SF my CPU threads are routinely hovering around 85℅ or so and even spending time maxed out at 100℅ on all four cores on my 2500K which is OC to 4.5Ghz. What are some settings to focus on turning down that would alleviate the CPU stress? So far I out textures down to high and have the fog and screen space reflections off.

Think this is the first game that has actually maxed out all of the cores for my CPU.

Honestly, I gave up and just locked the frame rate at 36FPS in RTSS (because I have a 144Hz monitor) and just raised all of the settings to Ultra after seeing how high CPU usage still was with everything on low. Same CPU and overclock on my end with a 1070 OC'd to 2113MHz.

CPUs may show 90-100% usage but that doesn't mean the CPU is literally maxed out, it could and usually does have more to give, I've seen this a lot in GTA V.
How you can tell if you're truly CPU limited is if your GPU usage is below 95-99%

One thing you could try is changing the CPU affinity in Task Manager to only use 4 cores, that would be "CPU 0-3" for quad core i7 processors, you could even disable hyper-threading in the bios as this could give you a better idea of how it would perform on a 4 core processor.

If you use Task Manager to disable the threads then you would be able to see how the game scales from 4 to 8 threads while it's running, if your GPU usage is notably lower as you disable the cores/threads then the game is scaling past 4 threads, you could then check the performance increase from enabling each one.

It would be really good to see this performs with a 6 or 8 core processor, as you could see how it scales from 4-8 cores, and even the logical processors from hyper-threading.

Topic I saw the other day using a Xeon E5-2686 v3, of course clock speed is relatively low compared to actual desktop CPUs but still the game really, really, really likes having access to as many cores and thread usage as it can get.


https://linustechtips.com/main/topi...extremely-cpu-bound-16-threads-is-not-enough/
 
How well does the game run when locked to 30fps, and is it possible to turn up all settings and still maintain 30fps?

Using the above method, what's the best setting to minimise aliasing?
 
what other setting has a big impact on cpu performance?
Geometry, terrain, vegetation, headlight shadows probably.

No. streaming doesn't allow smooth 16.666 ms frametimes in a lot of situations. Streaming tech doesn't scale correctly for high end PCs.
Why do you think that it's any different on consoles? I've yet to see a console game (not a port / remaster) which always maintain the stated framerate.

Ashes of Singularity is a huge exception, maybe because it was always planned to use dx12 or maybe because it is a pc exclusive and the devs can concentrate on just one platform. idk.

There is also Gears 4, which seems to run fine, but we also can't compare dx11 vs dx12 performance there. So...

And yes, your last sentence seems to be accurate.
AOTS is an exception because it's basically the only DX12 game currently which is using the engine build with DX12 (Mantle really but there's no difference) in mind. The rest are all DX11 games ported to DX12 later. But even still AOTS is not the only example of gains in CPU limited situations with DX12. There are gains in RoTTR and in Hitman and AMD's h/w basically get performance from DX12 in all but a couple of titles b/c of their DX11 driver. The key thing here is that the faster the GPUs will become - the more and more they'll be limited by CPU when running modern multiplatform titles. And this is where DX12 may start to show some good results.
 
So just got a hold of this and downloading it along with the high res texture pack.

Is the high res pack worth it if I play at 1440p?

Also what performance can I expect with a gtx 1080 and a 5820k @ 4.4ghz with 16gb of DDR4 @ 3000?
 
So just got a hold of this and downloading it along with the high res texture pack.

Is the high res pack worth it if I play at 1440p?

Also what performance can I expect with a gtx 1080 and a 5820k @ 4.4ghz with 16gb of DDR4 @ 3000?

The texture pack is nice and not a problem for 8gb cards.

based on my 1070 I'd say:


1440p
+1.25 pixel density (improves IQ a lot, especially when using the temporal solution).
Temporal AA
headlight shadows: 2 cars (maybe more)
Geometry v.high (maybe ultra)
Shadows ultra
Screenspace Reflections v.high
Extra Detail 0%
rest: as high as possible.

This should give you 1440p/60 most of the time. Turning Screenspace reflections off is the most easy way to enhance performance by ~20%.
 
Anyone else have bits of the HUD randomly stop working? Like the 'cover' prompts and the radio station popups. I have to quit to the main menu and reload my save to get them to show up again.
 
Only weird thing I've noticed is small black bars in the left and right side of the screen during cutscenes. It's fine in game. Anyone else?
 
Honestly, I gave up and just locked the frame rate at 36FPS in RTSS (because I have a 144Hz monitor) and just raised all of the settings to Ultra after seeing how high CPU usage still was with everything on low. Same CPU and overclock on my end with a 1070 OC'd to 2113MHz.



Topic I saw the other day using a Xeon E5-2686 v3, of course clock speed is relatively low compared to actual desktop CPUs but still the game really, really, really likes having access to as many cores and thread usage as it can get.


https://linustechtips.com/main/topi...extremely-cpu-bound-16-threads-is-not-enough/

Oh wow nice find, thanks!

Yeah I saw someone with a Titan X Pascal SLI rig and a 6850K, the CPU usage was around 70-80% at times, crazy stuff really.

The parallelism of the game engine looks to be superb seeing as it uses 18 threads like that, I dont believe I've ever seen a game put 12+ thread processors above 60% usage, it's incredible to see!

Here's the video with the 6850K and Titan X Pascal SLI, this is a 6 core 12 thread processor: https://youtu.be/AZMSGGSdvHU
 
I have a GTX 1070 and an i5-4590 3.3 GHz.

I can not get this game to run smooth at all. Even at High (which is basically medium) settings I wildly fly from 22-80 fps, averaging around 45 most of the time.

I did a locked 30, which helps, but it still drops and freezes for a few seconds constantly, like every couple blocks while I'm driving.

I know my CPU needs an upgrade but damn I feel like I shouldn't be struggling to run this game at High. These are the auto selected recommended settings too.
 
i5 4670k @ 4.2GHz, G1 GTX 1080 stock, 8GB RAM. Getting an average of 50ish FPS at very high settings, sometimes dropping to 40 (Near Coit Tower I noticed this a lot)

I want to try this temporal filtering thing, but I don't see anywhere to turn it on.
 
i5 4670k @ 4.2GHz, G1 GTX 1080 stock, 8GB RAM. Getting an average of 50ish FPS, sometimes dropping to 40 (Near Coit Tower I noticed this a lot)

I want to try this temporal filtering thing, but I don't see anywhere to turn it on.

Up 2 from bottom on the 2nd page of Video settings
 
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