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Watch_Dogs PC Performance Thread

LilJoka

Member
This game is a stuttering pile of mess - both in 4K and 4K Surround.

With everything maxed out, including HBAO+ High, I get around 25 FPS in 4K Surround.

With the same settings in 4K, I get around 40 FPS w/ a LOT of stuttering.

It is almost unplayable.

This is w/ a 3970X @ 4.8Ghz and 4x GTX-Titan Black SCs @ 1215Mhz. :rolleyes:

Nice specs. What about 1080p?
Have you updated to the latest nVidia drivers which have the Watch_Dogs SLI profiles? Try High textures.

Isn't the PS4 gpu directly comparable to a r7 265 though?

Kind of, but people are saying the stuttering is because all the games memory is in the GDDR5 on the consoles, whereas on PC its not unified, its on DDR3 and GDDR5.
 

Authority

Banned
I find it hard to believe they got the PC version to run smoothly on more than a few machines. It's just amazing to me that they released it in this state. Last time I pre-order a Ubi game.

Remember Rome: Total War II launch?

Well here we go again.
 
Isn't the PS4 gpu directly comparable to a r7 265 though?
Only if you took it out of a PS4, and put it in a PC, where it would not be able to benefit from the unified memory, and would be more limited by all that lovely PC stuff relating to the OS, drivers, and infinite combinations of hardware that the consoles don't have to deal with.

But to answer your original question, it appears to be 'no'. There are people complaining of stutters on high-end PCs at lower settings than the PS4 version, so while in theory a mid-range GPU might be able to run Watch Dogs on high at 1080p, most users appear to be getting performance problems. The PS4 version is stable and a decent effort considering the problems that are occurring on PC.
 

nbthedude

Member
I feel bad for people still having the stuttering problem.

After mine magically fixed itself I've put in 10 hours over the last few days and I have to say I'm enjoying it quite a bit.
 

30IR

Banned
Don't mean to troll, but I say GTA IV ENB is WAY better than this game.

With everything on Ultra etc., this POS still gets around 40 FPS AND stuttering out the wazoo w/ 4x GTX-Titan Black SC.

I can play GTA IV on 4K Surround (6480x3840) w/ ENB (max settings) and get around 30 FPS.

GTA IV ENB @ 4K Surround:
jIeiniog44TeX.jpg
 

nbthedude

Member
Don't mean to troll, but I say GTA IV ENB is WAY better than this game.

With everything on Ultra etc., this POS still gets around 40 FPS AND stuttering out the wazoo w/ 4x GTX-Titan Black SC.

I can play GTA IV on 4K Surround (6480x3840) w/ ENB (max settings) and get around 30 FPS.

GTA IV ENB @ 4K Surround:
jIeiniog44TeX.jpg

Perhaps but there are other things that graphics.

GTA IV doesn't let you slow down time while driving, flip open a baracade behind you, open a garage door in front of you, and speed out the other end unnoticed. It also has absolutely shit gunplay and on foot mechanics.

GTA IV does have funnier satire though.
 

LilJoka

Member
Perhaps but there are other things that graphics.

GTA IV doesn't let you slow down time while driving, flip open a baracade behind you, open a garage door in front of you, and speed out the other end unnoticed. It also has absolutely shit gunplay and on foot mechanics.

GTA IV does have funnier satire though.

My honest opinion, i rather play GTA V on my launch 360 with is super loud DVD drive, fans and at a juddery 30fps than play Watch_Dogs. Its just way more fun, i can spend ages just driving around doing silly things marvelling at all the little details that Rockstar put in.
 

nbthedude

Member
My honest opinion, i rather play GTA V on my launch 360 with is super loud DVD drive, fans and at a juddery 30fps than play Watch_Dogs. Its just way more fun, i can spend ages just driving around doing silly things marvelling at all the little details that Rockstar put in.

I won't disagree that the writing is better in GTA. But I think it's worth giving Watch Dogs at least a handful of hours before passing judgement. Once I did about a half a dozen campaign missions and started opening up the skill trees it became a lot more fun.

I also like that they actually REWARD you for things like evading the cops. You get huge EXP bonuses towards skill upgrades. In GTA evading the cops while you were trying to do something else was always just a hassle. I usually ended up just killing myself on purpose or restarting the mission because it was no fun.
 

Skyzard

Banned
My honest opinion, i rather play GTA V on my launch 360 with is super loud DVD drive, fans and at a juddery 30fps than play Watch_Dogs. Its just way more fun, i can spend ages just driving around doing silly things marvelling at all the little details that Rockstar put in.

I'm sure that would be to do with stuttering right? I'm doing that in Watch Dogs and I'm impressed with the little details.
 

nbthedude

Member
I'm sure that would be to do with stuttering right? I'm doing that in Watch Dogs and I'm impressed with the little details.

Yeah I don't think it is up to GTA quality but that's also a bit unfair since this is literally their first stab at that type of a game. But that doesn't change the fact that they got a lot of the little details right and in my opinion the basic driving/gunplay is balanced to be a lot more fun than in GTA. It's just rough around the edges sometimes (especially some of the stupid artibrary stealth missions like the prison infiltration mission), but GTA was guilty of that as well.

I still prefer the world of Sleeping Dogs more than the others but i kind of wish I could have these toys in that game world.
 

Linius

Member
Watch_Dogs is a game of extremes. At some moments it just looks great and at other moments the graphics aren't impressive at all. At some moments you're doing cool stuff and everything goes smooth but at other moments it's bugs all over the place. Flying cars, flying people, guns that can't be holstered. It's like the scale of the project was too big for Ubi to handle. I feel like they will deliver a much better experience if a new game in this franchise only comes to current gen and PC. They should be able to optimize things better and master the new hardware better too.

Anyways, I'm running this on an MSI GE40 gaming laptop. The specs are okay but far from impressive for demanding games: i7 4702MQ, GTX760M and 8GBs of memory. But I do like how the game runs on it, locked to 30 FPS that is. Some settings on medium, textures on high and shader on low. AA on FXAA and then it can look like this:

iGOAaxplsyOg5.gif


I'm really impressed by how it looks. I guess it's somewhere just below PS4 quality but I'll take it :p
 

nbthedude

Member
I know! I haven't been able to start the game while connected to uplay at all!

I turned it on Offline mode for the entire day on Thursday and played online but yesterday I was able to play online just fine.

I'm getting ready to boot it up again and if I can't play online I'm going to be fucking pissed because I assume that means I lose all my online bonuses due to that stupid decision to wipe it everytime you go in Offline mode.

Now that is inexcusable garbage: i get penalized and lose progress in the game because Ubisoft's online infrastructure is too shitty to allow me to play.
 

Serandur

Member
Only if you took it out of a PS4, and put it in a PC, where it would not be able to benefit from the unified memory, and would be more limited by all that lovely PC stuff relating to the OS, drivers, and infinite combinations of hardware that the consoles don't have to deal with.

But to answer your original question, it appears to be 'no'. There are people complaining of stutters on high-end PCs at lower settings than the PS4 version, so while in theory a mid-range GPU might be able to run Watch Dogs on high at 1080p, most users appear to be getting performance problems. The PS4 version is stable and a decent effort considering the problems that are occurring on PC.

The only setting causing people problems above PS4 setting is the texture quality, and that seems to be messing up everyone's configuration regardless of amount of VRAM or hardware capability. The issue is on Ubisoft's end there, otherwise an R7 265 has demonstrated no difficulty with 1920x1080 and 30 FPS on this game with comparable-to-PS4 settings. You're under the assumption console GPUs are much more efficiently run than PC GPUs. It's not true. A case can be made for CPUs and draw calls, maybe the unified memory structure (more a cost-saving measure, really), but modern graphics APIs, as I've described before, are very efficient and no, the PS4's GPU is not demonstrating any such efficiency advantage. If anything, it's the other way around (perhaps due to unforeseen limitations within the hardware and how it's been modified, problematic development tools, the PS4's own drivers, or maybe just straight-up limitations from the PS4's Jaguar CPU). No R7 265 owner would have to resign themselves to 1600x900, nor the lack of anisotropic filtering. Nor do consoles have to deal with the lighting, AA, shadowing, and level of detail effects PC gamers demand of their games.

We've seen nothing to promote this myth of console GPUs outperforming their PC equivalents, the only issue with Watch Dogs appears to be a texture-streaming problem with the engine itself that is only a problem largely for Ubisoft and their refusal to acknowledge the manner in which contemporary PC hardware functions. Like AC IV's bizarre lack of multithreading support, the issue is not with the hardware, it's with the company trying to displace blame just because they would have to put in some effort into a version that is not running on the same, exact hardware configuration as the consoles. The stutters are caused by the texture-streaming solution, nothing else. R7 265 general performance holds up very well in comparison to the PS4 performance, in plenty of cases it is arguably even favorable. Ubisoft is not the metric by which one should be judging anything, they have an unashamed history of terrible PC versions no other company does and the problems are always, always tied back to programming issues (that are relieved by patches) rather than hardware inadequacy.
 

GHG

Member
Don't mean to troll, but I say GTA IV ENB is WAY better than this game.

With everything on Ultra etc., this POS still gets around 40 FPS AND stuttering out the wazoo w/ 4x GTX-Titan Black SC.

I can play GTA IV on 4K Surround (6480x3840) w/ ENB (max settings) and get around 30 FPS.

GTA IV ENB @ 4K Surround:
jIeiniog44TeX.jpg

Don't mean to troll but then thats exactly what you end up doing... And then you go and post the shittest washed out bloomtastic GTA IV ENB shot. Tasteless.

Honestly, this thread is meant to be about Watch Dogs and finding ways to solve the stuttering so that people can actually enjoy the game on their PC's. If people want to talk about how great and amazing (or boring and soulless) GTA IV is then there are plenty of other threads that you can do that in (e.g. the GTA IV threads...) .

On the subject of watch dogs... I did some further testing and it seems that locking the framerate in Afterburner and even just using the OSD in afterburner introduces more stuttering than when I use Nvidia Inspector to lock the framerate. Strangely enough, locking the game to 40fps in Inspector has also given me a smoother experience over locking it to 30fps.

Also I changed the DeferredFxQuality="console" setting in the ini to "pc" and it seems to have increased the amount of rubbish/debris that there is floating around but not much else.
 

Linius

Member
Does anyone have any tips for me on how to get the most out of this game on my system (see two posts up)? I've only used the settings options the game gives me. I honestly have know knowdledge of other software to tweak my experience with.
 

Wag

Member
Did I also mention how bad driving is with the XBOX controller? It's all over the place. Plus the fact there's no way to adjust the sensitivity of the controller in the settings makes it worse.

It's really hard for me to believe the PC version had serious QA before it went gold. If it did it appears they really just didn't care.
 

Robert7lee

Neo Member
I think I am just using the Nvidia optimizers defaults for the game but here are my settings if anyone wants to try to replicate it:

Resolution: 1920x1080
Refresh rate: 60
Window mode: Windowed (but it isn't; it is full screen so you got me)
Vsync: Off
GPU max frame buffer: 3
Textures: Ultra
Anti-Aliasing: Temporal SMAA


Graphics Quality: Custom
Level if Detail: Ultra
Shadows: Ultra
Refkections: Ultra
Ambient Occlusion: MHBAO
Motion Blur: On
Depth of Field: On
Water: Ultra
Shader: High


I get smooth frame rate and havent notced any tearing and very infrequent stuttering (like mahbe once every 5-10 minutes for half a second.

System specs (including everything just to be thorough)

I7 4770k @ default clock w/ water coolingr
AsRock z87 Extreme 4
Gigabyte 3GB GTX Geforce 780 OC
16 GB Kingston Hyperblu 1600mhz DDR3
250GB Samsung SSD
Windows 8.1


Running game through Steam BPM on a Plasma 50" Panasonic set as my primary screen with my Monitor as my secondary screen.

With those settings my frame rate will drop to the 40s or below whilst driving.

Difference is I have titan default, i7 4770k @4.2 ghz standard cooler, 32gb ram, sata hard drive
 

maneil99

Member
Don't mean to troll, but I say GTA IV ENB is WAY better than this game.

With everything on Ultra etc., this POS still gets around 40 FPS AND stuttering out the wazoo w/ 4x GTX-Titan Black SC.

I can play GTA IV on 4K Surround (6480x3840) w/ ENB (max settings) and get around 30 FPS.

GTA IV ENB @ 4K Surround:
jIeiniog44TeX.jpg

That looks absolutely awful....
 

Denton

Member
Did I also mention how bad driving is with the XBOX controller? It's all over the place. Plus the fact there's no way to adjust the sensitivity of the controller in the settings makes it worse.

It's really hard for me to believe the PC version had serious QA before it went gold. If it did it appears they really just didn't care.

This post makes no sense to me. I have been playing for some 15 hours already, all with x360pad on PC, and had zero issues. Driving is perfectly fine for me. The only problem I have driving-wise, is that I wish the incar cockpit view gave greater freedom in looking around. That is literally the only issue for me.
 

Linius

Member
This post makes no sense to me. I have been playing for some 15 hours already, all with x360pad on PC, and had zero issues. Driving is perfectly fine for me. The only problem I have driving-wise, is that I wish the incar cockpit view gave greater freedom in looking around. That is literally the only issue for me.

Yeah, I usually drive with the view where you can't see the inside of the car. But I sometimes feel limited in my sight. When the police are pushing me off the road I don't even see them, I just feel it it happening :p

I do find it a lot less stressfull driving like that. If I don't see them coming I drive better. It's all in my head, I know.
 

Dries

Member
I feel like they will deliver a much better experience if a new game in this franchise only comes to current gen and PC. They should be able to optimize things better and master the new hardware better too.

But how will the managers at Ubisoft get their vacation on the Bahama's then?
 
Anyone ran into a hug where you can't access the cameras for hacking? Mine will just go into the camera and back right out. Can't progress through the game because of it lol.
 

Dries

Member
I turned it on Offline mode for the entire day on Thursday and played online but yesterday I was able to play online just fine.

I'm getting ready to boot it up again and if I can't play online I'm going to be fucking pissed because I assume that means I lose all my online bonuses due to that stupid decision to wipe it everytime you go in Offline mode.

Now that is inexcusable garbage: i get penalized and lose progress in the game because Ubisoft's online infrastructure is too shitty to allow me to play.

Well, I also just now found something else. Whenever I have DxTory on and attempt to start the game it also won't start. I have to first start the game and then ctrl-tab back and start dxtory.
 

Dries

Member
Well, I also just now found something else. Whenever I have DxTory on and attempt to start the game it also won't start. I have to first start the game and then ctrl-tab back and start dxtory.

What the flying fuck.. At once, dxtory doesn't detect watch dogs anymore when it's running. This afternoon it worked perfectly and now this. I can't believe this shit.
 

Denton

Member

My man. I spent 12 hours playing this today. I am constantly amazed how real the world feels. The lightning - it is more real feeling than anything I have seen in games so far, even during daylight, especially in downtown. In those 12 hours, I did 2 (two!) story missions. There is so much great content. I love even the fucking collectibles, which I HATED in AC4. This game is in fact so much better than ANY AC game it is not even funny.

Check this one of mine:
http://www.gamersyde.com/thqstream_watch_dogs_pc_gameplay_ultra_spec-GnQlbDKKL310Qxyj_en.html
 

TSM

Member
Does Gsync help with the stutter?

It does somewhat. With G-Sync on I don't get stutters. I get drops in FPS and then surges. It's more like hitches then stutters since it doesn't repeat frames or have stalls while it waits for the next refresh cycle.
 

Hawkian

The Cryptarch's Bane
Why no sound on your webms?

I encourage everyone to play the sound for mine. Adds to the video like quality of webms.
ah I figured for size purposes...

If I may, what do you use to record the videos and what settings do you use for the webms?

ShadowPlay can't record Borderless Windowed at all, and it like Fullscreen is really not ideal :[
 
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