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Watch_Dogs PC Performance Thread

JAYinHD

Member
I dropped the textures down to medium and have everything else on high or ultra with Temporal AA. Doing this completely got rid of the stuttering issue while I'm driving. I have a GTX 770 2GB using the stock clocks with an i5 4570. I also used the borderless option which somehow kept my framerate pretty steady between 60 and 45fps.
 

Smokey

Member
Some 4K gameplay shots. Ultra settings + SMAA

14108089017_a9aedda73d_k.jpg

14292666822_57ac4ff01e_k.jpg

14107990820_4d71ca9b25_k.jpg

14108091217_d4b7ee48f3_k.jpg

14107991648_a8dc9778d2_k.jpg
 
Right, so I've just played the last 6 chapters of Wolfenstein without issue, yet for some reason I can't even run WD on medium textures and low settings without my PSU making a clicking sound. I'm at the stage now where I just can't be bothered with this game anymore.

If anyone's curious:

Gigabyte AMD 7950 with 14.6 drivers
i5-3570K
8GB RAM

The PSU is an XFX Pro 550W Core Edition if anyone is wondering about that.
 

Bebpo

Banned
How would this run on a 580? I mostly have been indie gaming on the PC for the last 3 years since I bought the 580 and at that time it could hit 60fps maxed on everything sans Crysis/Metro 2033 which could be maxed 30fps+ no problem.

Can I run this 1080p/30fps maxed with no AA or 2x AA on the 580? Or have the newer cards dated the 580 and now it struggles for 30fps maxed on these types of games?
 

Smokey

Member
Those are beautiful. Is the game playable at 4K

Yes it is. Well Ultra was pretty choppy but not nearly as bad as this morning. May have something to do with adding the disablepagefile line to the shortcut target. I just dropped textures down to High, but left everything else on Ultra and it was even smoother. Still choppy here and there but better. Was getting between 50-60fps with High Textures, SMAA, Ultra settings, and SLI. Still want to play around some more. Now I need to find out why my wired 360 controller spazzes out at times and doesn't allow me to properly control Aiden.

We're getting there though!
 
The only way I get no stutter is on medium textures. I can max out everything else, even MSAA 8x, with no stuttering. Anything higher than medium textures and the stuttering comes right back. I've tried high textures with everything else low or off and no AA. The game still stutters and I just can't get into the game. It makes driving difficult and just takes me out of the game completely.

This is on GTX 780 Ti SC, i5-4670k, 8GB ram at 1920x1080.

I give up with trying to make it work from my end. Hopefully Ubi, NVIDIA or the community release something. The worst thing for me is not being able to send the message to Ubi because I already bought the game and apparently it's their best first day release so they don't really have any incentive to fix the issue.
I also had this issue and JUST figured out the game thing worked for me too!
Phenom II x4 965 OCed to 4Ghz. My 7970 is also overclocked to 1125Mhz, memory clock to 1575Mhz. Stuttering goes away entirely when I drop the texture quality.

"Phenom II x4 940 Stock" club here... medium settings, saved my life, The stutter is 99% gone, I can drive as fast as I want and it stutters only about 1/10 times that it used to, AMAZING.

Also, screw you Ubisoft for the VRAM hogging. Also TXAA, why cant every game have it, it's amazing.
 

b0bbyJ03

Member
I also had this issue and JUST figured out the game thing worked for me too!


"Phenom II x4 940 Stock" club here... medium settings, saved my life, The stutter is 99% gone, I can drive as fast as I want and it stutters only about 1/10 times that it used to, AMAZING.

Also, screw you Ubisoft for the VRAM hogging. Also TXAA, why cant every game have it, it's amazing.

so are you going to play with medium textures? i got the same results and im not sure if i want to deal with the stuttering but have a better looking experience or go with no stuttering and ugly textures.
 
I've only played about an hour so far, but the game runs silky smooth so far on Ultra settings, except I have Vsync off since I'm running borderless.

OS:
Windows 8.1
Processor:
Intel i7 4770k @ 3.5 GHz
Memory:
8 GB 2133 DDR3
Graphics:
Gigabye Radeon R9 290 4GB GDDR5
Hard Drive:
Samsung SSD 840 Pro
Resolution:
2560 x 1440
 

Brofist

Member
Yes it is. Well Ultra was pretty choppy but not nearly as bad as this morning. May have something to do with adding the disablepagefile line to the shortcut target. I just dropped textures down to High, but left everything else on Ultra and it was even smoother. Still choppy here and there but better. Was getting between 50-60fps with High Textures, SMAA, Ultra settings, and SLI. Still want to play around some more. Now I need to find out why my wired 360 controller spazzes out at times and doesn't allow me to properly control Aiden.

We're getting there though!

Happened to me too. Seemed to coincide with using Shadowplay, but I'm not 100% sure of that
 

golem

Member
BAsed on what people are reporting, it looks like there is an issue with the texture streaming algorithms on PC.

Hopefully they can fix it up soon. It's apparently pretty bad for AMD card users specially unless they drop texture to medium.

My 290 is fine on Ultra...

On a SSD though
 
Yes it is. Well Ultra was pretty choppy but not nearly as bad as this morning. May have something to do with adding the disablepagefile line to the shortcut target. I just dropped textures down to High, but left everything else on Ultra and it was even smoother. Still choppy here and there but better. Was getting between 50-60fps with High Textures, SMAA, Ultra settings, and SLI. Still want to play around some more. Now I need to find out why my wired 360 controller spazzes out at times and doesn't allow me to properly control Aiden.

We're getting there though!

How'd you get rid of the HUD yo?
 

BPoole

Member
I've only played about an hour so far, but the game runs silky smooth so far on Ultra settings, except I have Vsync off since I'm running borderless.

OS:
Windows 8.1
Processor:
Intel i7 4770k @ 3.5 GHz
Memory:
8 GB 2133 DDR3
Graphics:
Gigabye Radeon R9 290 4GB GDDR5
Hard Drive:
Samsung SSD 840 Pro
Resolution:
2560 x 1440
That's pretty reassuring for me. I have a very similar setup, except I have 2500k at 4.3Ghz.

Do you have oyur 290 overclocked at all? I have mine bumped up a bit to 1050/1350
 
so are you going to play with medium textures? i got the same results and im not sure if i want to deal with the stuttering but have a better looking experience or go with no stuttering and ugly textures.

the stutter is decent in missions where you're hacking and not travelling much, but try driving in a mission, or running, or catching someone after you find out you've been invaded, you cant catch up with them EVER, because when you stutter it only hurts you since it doesn't stutter them too.

So Yes, I'm playing with Medium textures, i miss the High textyured water but I'm okay with 90% less stutter over slightly higher resolution textures in some areas. I'll live.
 
BAsed on what people are reporting, it looks like there is an issue with the texture streaming algorithms on PC.

Hopefully they can fix it up soon. It's apparently pretty bad for AMD card users specially unless they drop texture to medium.

Everything on high runs very well for me with a 280x. Slows down a bit when driving around but no stuttering.
 

Mattenth

Member
I'm honestly most surprised with NVIDIA - how could they get behind it? I mean, I'm sure they've been deeply involved as Watch Dogs is their AAA "gold standard" for the rest of the year in terms of showing off their tech, and yet the game runs so shitty.

I feel like my computer is a powerhouse... i7-4770k, GTX 780 Ti, 16gb RAM, Samsung SSD, good power supply, good liquid cooling, etc. and yet the game still hitches.

This is just from driving around for a minute using the "Nvidia experience optimized" settings. It makes me crack up that Nvidia actually thinks this is "optimized."

Every single spike is a noticable stutter...

pIrZ4Ob.png
 
My Specs:

2 gtx 780 6gb edition sli'd
i7 4700k @ 4.7ghz
16gb 2300mhz
samsung evo + pro ssd's

My settings:
All Ultra, hbao + high, msaa x8, 1080p, dof off (currently)

I get 68-72 avg a lot of the time a bit higher. When walking/running, exploding things I never see anything less than 58.

When I drive.....well I guess you can call it that. I will get random stutters which seem like huge fps drops, but aren't. Of course they cause me to crash :p

Afterburner reports:
5.5gb vram usage (wow!)
87-95% avg on each of the cards
67% avg cpu
5.5-6gb ram usage

What is interesting is just about when I hit 6gb ram usage, I get the stutters while driving. This is the only time I experience any stuttering in game. My theory is that this is when it starts using a page file. The question is why? I have 16gb of ram and about 10 is free when this happens. I haven't tried disabling this yet and will report back.

Besides the driving stutter the game looks and runs amazing for me. The sad part is the vram and gpu usage. I should not be using that much for this game.

Has anyone found a solution to the stuttering I am experiencing? It's not a vram issue for me.
 

finalflame

Member
I'm honestly most surprised with NVIDIA - how could they get behind it? I mean, I'm sure they've been deeply involved as Watch Dogs is their AAA "gold standard" for the rest of the year in terms of showing off their tech, and yet the game runs so shitty.

I feel like my computer is a powerhouse... i7-4770k, GTX 780 Ti, 16gb RAM, Samsung SSD, good power supply, good liquid cooling, etc. and yet the game still hitches.

This is just from driving around for a minute using the "Nvidia experience optimized" settings. It makes me crack up that Nvidia actually thinks this is "optimized."

Every single spike is a noticable stutter...

pIrZ4Ob.png

My system is very similar to yours, but with an i5-4670K. Same deal, watercooled 780 Ti, etc.

I get the same fucking stutters. It's not an FPS problem, as I can hold 50-60 FPS on a mix of High/Ultra at 1440 w/ Temporal SMAA, it's the fucking hitching.

Ubi needs to acknowledge this and patch it. I think it's an issue regardless of system power. I'd love to see someone with 32gb of RAM try to load this game into a RAMDisk and play it that way, to see if that somehow resolves the stuttering at all.
 

SaberEdge

Member
I also had this issue and JUST figured out the game thing worked for me too!


"Phenom II x4 940 Stock" club here... medium settings, saved my life, The stutter is 99% gone, I can drive as fast as I want and it stutters only about 1/10 times that it used to, AMAZING.

Also, screw you Ubisoft for the VRAM hogging. Also TXAA, why cant every game have it, it's amazing.

I agree with you about TXAA. I use it in every game that has it. No other form of anti-aliasing aside from super sampling cleans up the image quality in motion nearly as well as TXAA. The blur is minimal at higher resolutions and I would take a slight amount of blur over all the flickering and crawling jaggies and shader aliasing we see so often in modern games.

SGSSAA is the only thing better, but it doesn't work in many games (especially directX 11 games) and even when it works it hits performance very hard. I use it when I can, but TXAA is a nice alternative with a minimal performance hit.
 

Surfheart

Member
Man I feel sorry for you guys. All this is why I got off the PC merry go round. Got tired of tweaking this, disabling that, benchmarking, trying this driver trying that driver, doing arcane things to my OS. I just want to stick the disk in and play. It's liberating.
 

Smokey

Member
Happened to me too. Seemed to coincide with using Shadowplay, but I'm not 100% sure of that

I don't have it enabled though?

How'd you get rid of the HUD yo?

Go to "C:\Users\UserName\Documents\My Games\Watch_Dogs\*\GameProfile.xml" (Or figure out where GameProfile.xml is stored in your PC) and open this GameProfile.xml in text editor like Notepad.

In '<GameProfile....</GameProfile>' change :

UseCompassMiniMap="1" UseRoadSignHilight="1" UseSubtitles="1" UseReticle="1" UseWaypoint="1" UseHintsAndTutorial="1" UsePdaNotification="1" UseMinimap="1" UseDynamicMission="1" UseItemAndRewards="1" UseMissionUpdate="1" UseFelony="1" UseEquipmentAndTools="1" UseAmbx="0"

to

UseCompassMiniMap="0" UseRoadSignHilight="0" UseSubtitles="0" UseReticle="0" UseWaypoint="0" UseHintsAndTutorial="0" UsePdaNotification="0" UseMinimap="0" UseDynamicMission="0" UseItemAndRewards="0" UseMissionUpdate="0" UseFelony="0" UseEquipmentAndTools="0" UseAmbx="0"
 

finalflame

Member
Man I feel sorry for you guys. All this is why I got off the PC merry go round. Got tired of tweaking this, disabling that, benchmarking, trying this driver trying that driver, doing arcane things to my OS. I just want to stick the disk in and play. It's liberating.

This is just a crappy example of a game. I'd say even with minor stuttering, my experience is FAR better than 30fps on a console. I can get the game to run @ 35 FPS with everything maxxed (Ultra, TXAA 4x), but it's unplayable. I can't imagine being locked to 30 on console.
 
Man I feel sorry for you guys. All this is why I got off the PC merry go round. Got tired of tweaking this, disabling that, benchmarking, trying this driver trying that driver, doing arcane things to my OS. I just want to stick the disk in and play. It's liberating.

I, as many enjoy that aspect of it very much. There is nothing like staying up all night tweaking your settings, overclocking, etc all to gain just a little bit more performance. For me it feels like I enjoy that just as much as playing. I remember trying to play Crysis for the first time.....had no money for a killer gpu, so had to work with what I had.
 

Codeblew

Member
Man I feel sorry for you guys. All this is why I got off the PC merry go round. Got tired of tweaking this, disabling that, benchmarking, trying this driver trying that driver, doing arcane things to my OS. I just want to stick the disk in and play. It's liberating.

And people were speccing out $500 PC's a few months ago to compete with next-gen consoles. I feel bad for the people that fell for that BS.
 

x3sphere

Member
It's runs at a pretty consistent 30fps at 4K@Ultra without AA, even with just one Titan. With both Titans it runs at a higher framerate but the stuttering destroys it.

I've got a 4K TV and similar experience with a single 290X. Solid 30 FPS 99% of the time. Too bad there are no GPUs yet with HDMI 2.0 though so pointless for me to try CF.
 

Brofist

Member
Man I feel sorry for you guys. All this is why I got off the PC merry go round. Got tired of tweaking this, disabling that, benchmarking, trying this driver trying that driver, doing arcane things to my OS. I just want to stick the disk in and play. It's liberating.

For some PC gamers that is the fun part.
 

Smokey

Member
Man I feel sorry for you guys. All this is why I got off the PC merry go round. Got tired of tweaking this, disabling that, benchmarking, trying this driver trying that driver, doing arcane things to my OS. I just want to stick the disk in and play. It's liberating.

But tweaking is the fun part of PC gaming. The fact that I can decide what to do with my game and how it is presented to me. Now WD is unoptimized in places obviously, but there are tons of options for you to dig in and mess around with.
 

SaberEdge

Member
Game runs better on my vita via remote play than it does on my 680

Really?

Ok, I feel bad for those of you that are having trouble running this game. What settings are you using?

For anybody that has something in the same ballpark as my GTX 770 (like your 680) and a decent quad or octa-core processor, please try the following settings. If you aren't getting excellent graphics and solid performance I'll be shocked.

1. All settings in the "Graphics Quality" menu at ultra/on/highest
2. 2x TXAA (or temporal SMAA if you prefer).
3. Textures at "high" if you only have 2GB of VRAM.
4. Vsync off in "Display" menu.
5. Use "1/2 refresh rate" vsync in Nvidia Inspector or "Double vsync" in RadeonPro.

This will give you a proper vsynced 30fps. Frame limiters only prevent the framerate from going above whatever you set them at, but they don't properly sync the frame output to the refresh rate of the display, and this results in micro-stuttering.

Using the above settings you should be getting a solid 30fps in nearly every area with far better graphics and image quality than any of the console versions.
 

Tnecniv

Neo Member
Few hours played, some stutter, mostly while driving, not too bad from what I've seen so far. Running mostly smooth.

Windows 7
2600K (4.5ghz)
780 3GB (1150 core/6.5ghz memory)
8GB RAM (1333mhz)
1920x1200

Getting mostly 50-60fps with ultra everything, hbao and shaders high, DoF on, motion blur off (preference), temporal smaa.

14292291051_9b7ce6134a_o.png
 
Man I feel sorry for you guys. All this is why I got off the PC merry go round. Got tired of tweaking this, disabling that, benchmarking, trying this driver trying that driver, doing arcane things to my OS. I just want to stick the disk in and play. It's liberating.

Tweaking is fun and my game looks and runs way better than on consoles so I can't complain. :p
 

Red Comet

Member
I have to say I'm pretty satisfied with this game's performance on my system. It's much better optimized than AC4.

With AC4, no matter which settings I turn down, it's hard to achieve 60fps on my GTX 770 due to the poor optimization on the processor side of things.

With Watch Dogs I am able to turn down some settings and achieve a pretty stable 60fps, except for a few dips while driving mostly.

However, I actually prefer to just turn up everything to ultra, downsample a bit from 2048 x 1152 on a 1080p display, and use 2x TXAA, while capping the framerate at 30fps. This makes the game look pretty amazing, and very clean. Not to mention that 30fps seems a bit smoother in this game than in a lot of other games. Doesn't seem to be a lot of frame latency spikes...the frame delivery is very even on my system.


See I have much better results with AC4 with my system (probably due to SLI). By simply turning Physx off, I can maintain a constant 60 FPS with AC4 with no drops or stuttering to speak of with everything else maxed out. I've got to really tweak Watch_Dogs to get a constant 60 FPS and even then some stuttering and drops are unavoidable. I get better performance by turning SLI off, but there are still problems.

I'm debating whether or not to play this now, or to work on my backlog until there are some more fixes (with AC4 being at the top of my backlog). On one hand I can get easily get playable performance with some tweaks, but there are still issues and graphic quality has to be sacrificed somewhat. I think I'd enjoy the game more if I could run it smoothly virtually 100% of the time and if I could further increase some settings like AA, and possibly texture if they somehow fix the VRAM issue.
 

npa189

Member
I would be perfectly happy if it wasn't for this hitching/studdering. Its getting harder and harder to buy ubi PC games, they just don't seem to give a fuck.
 

TSM

Member
Well, I broke down and bought the game:

i7-3770
GTX 770 4GB
8GB DDR-1600
Inexpensive 120GB Sandisk SSD

I played the first mission and then started driving around. I'm playing using g-sync which really smooths out the game. Even so I'm definitely getting some minor hitching in my frame rate when I drive quickly. Everything is on ultra and I haven't started playing with settings yet. I'll play with it some more if I get a chance tomorrow.
 

Timu

Member
Go to "C:\Users\UserName\Documents\My Games\Watch_Dogs\*\GameProfile.xml" (Or figure out where GameProfile.xml is stored in your PC) and open this GameProfile.xml in text editor like Notepad.

In '<GameProfile....</GameProfile>' change :

UseCompassMiniMap="1" UseRoadSignHilight="1" UseSubtitles="1" UseReticle="1" UseWaypoint="1" UseHintsAndTutorial="1" UsePdaNotification="1" UseMinimap="1" UseDynamicMission="1" UseItemAndRewards="1" UseMissionUpdate="1" UseFelony="1" UseEquipmentAndTools="1" UseAmbx="0"

to

UseCompassMiniMap="0" UseRoadSignHilight="0" UseSubtitles="0" UseReticle="0" UseWaypoint="0" UseHintsAndTutorial="0" UsePdaNotification="0" UseMinimap="0" UseDynamicMission="0" UseItemAndRewards="0" UseMissionUpdate="0" UseFelony="0" UseEquipmentAndTools="0" UseAmbx="0"
There needs to be an option to have no HUD in game, gets tiring having to change them when I restart the game often.
 

K.Jack

Knowledge is power, guard it well
Man I feel sorry for you guys. All this is why I got off the PC merry go round. Got tired of tweaking this, disabling that, benchmarking, trying this driver trying that driver, doing arcane things to my OS. I just want to stick the disk in and play. It's liberating.

You should probably not post in this thread anymore.
 

Hazaro

relies on auto-aim
And people were speccing out $500 PC's a few months ago to compete with next-gen consoles. I feel bad for the people that fell for that BS.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

A game with hitching problems has happened before (FC3). Driver updates helped smooth it out.
A bad PC Port is not PC's fault.
 

fade_

Member
Man I feel sorry for you guys. All this is why I got off the PC merry go round. Got tired of tweaking this, disabling that, benchmarking, trying this driver trying that driver, doing arcane things to my OS. I just want to stick the disk in and play. It's liberating.

We could just put it on medium textures and "be done with it" and we'd still have higher than 30fps at 1080p. We just want and expect better and don't mind tinkering to get that.
 

GHG

Member
Ok so I locked the game to 30 fps in inspector last night and used Nvidia's normal Vsync over the in-game options and got very good results. I'm now running it at 2048 x 1152, (so slightly downsampled to 1080p) everything ultra with TXAA x2.

Its seems to have got rid of most of the stuttering and I'm very happy with the IQ on my HDTV. Not 100% stutter free, but I'll get 1 stutter in every 10 minutes or so of driving around rather than one every 30 seconds. Pretty happy with it now so think I'll dive in properly with these settings and start actually playing the game!

Interested to see what Vuze or other modders can come up with as I know I have 15-20 fps worth of headroom with my current settings so more eye candy will be welcome if possible :) .
 

Beepos

Member
Decided it probably will probably for the best I just settlle for a lock 30 frames and not try to go for 50-60.. it's just to inconsistent with the trade offs.

1920x1080
Textures High, Everything else Ultra with HABO High and TXAA x2.
Solid 30 frames 90% of the time though does dip no lower then 26 at times.

GTX 670 OC 2GB
i7 4770K stock
8GB Ram
Wins 8.1

Haven't played a game at 30 frames since the Crysis came. Game looks fantastic at least for open world...
 
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