Ubisoft Working On PC Patch For Watch Dogs, Offers Advice To Boost Performance
If youre one of many disheartened gamers playing Watch Dogs on PC, theres hope on the horizon. Ubisofts Sebastien Viard, the games Graphics Technical Director, took to Twitter this morning to address concerns, update players on an impending patch, and dish out some technical advice for getting the best performance.
Regardless of your preferred graphics card maker, Watch Dogs isnt living up to performance expectations on PC. Benchmarks across the internet have varied dramatically, and my sources at Nvidia suggest that even they cant get consistent back-to-back benchmark runs. Nvidia explains that Ubisofts Disrupt engine is quite complex, and that the way the game streams in data may be a potential bottleneck. If you think about the open world variables and the metadata that must be randomly assigned to every individual roaming the streets of Chicago (for the purpose of Aidens profiler tool), it stands to reason thats at least one factor impacting performance.
Nvidia says that AMD was free to approach Ubisoft at any time to suggest tweaks and improvements to the game for their hardware.
Ubisofts Sebastien Viard explains that Making an open world run on [next-generation] and [current-generation] consoles plus supporting PC is an incredibly complex task. He goes on to to say that Watch Dogs can use 3GB or more of RAM on next-gen consoles for graphics, and that your PC GPU needs enough Video Ram for Ultra options due to the lack of unified memory. Indeed, Video RAM requirements are hefty on PC, especially when cranking up the resolution beyond 1080p. (This is why I knew Sony was on the right track using unified GDDR5 memory for the PlayStation 4.)
While recent driver updates from Nvidia and AMD should improve general performance, Viard promises that their PC programmers are currently working on a patch to improve your experience, and thanks both his team and users for diligently reporting performance issues. The most perplexing thing about the PC version of Watch Dogs is how divided user experiences actually are. I saw at most 30% scaling when using Nvidia GPUs in SLI, while others with near-identical hardware see upwards of 75%. Some users see stutter and artifacting while others report no problems using even older generations of AMD and Nvidia cards.
In the meantime, Ubisofts Viard offers some technical advice for boosting performance, especially if youre experiencing stuttering or drastic framerate drops: Reduce your texture quality, level of Anti-Aliasing (FXAA is the least taxing in my experience), and/or resolution. Unless you have 4GB of Video RAM, playing at 1440p or 4K will be problematic, at least for now.
Watch Dogs is an important release for Ubisoft, and its reassuring to see their team working on improving the game for PC users. Nvidia is also continuing to consult with Ubisoft engineers on optimizing drivers for the game.
