• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Watch_Dogs PC Performance Thread

The Worse, creator of the mod on Guru3d: http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=390114&page=40

Has made massive discoveries/improvements. He has discovered that almost all of the shaders and improvements seen in 2012 and 2013 are still in the game files, such as the e3 2012 explosions. For now he has managed to implement dynamic shadows from headlights, the increased rain density, increased NPC density, as well as 2012 e3 bloom and lens flare.
When he manages to unpack certain files, he will be able to activate everything, such as POMs, etc.

That is mighty cool. Can't wait to grab this on sale sometime soon.
 

red731

Member
Click for GIFs - by Dead Squallit -
http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=4840897&postcount=383

HeftySlushyAnemonecrab.gif

MetallicPoisedBoutu.gif


More in the link. F me sideways.
 

Skyzard

Banned
Fuck yes. Back in UK (to my rig) by tuesday. Can't wait for the updated xml! Downloading a backup now ha.


SHIT LOOKS INSANE!


And more improvements to come tomorrow apparently.
 

Dries

Member
Looks great, but as long as the game still stutters like crazy when driving it doesn't mean jack shit to us.
 
Here's a couple screenies using the mod:
14238494378_58bd906922_h.jpg

watch_dogs.exe_DX11_20140614_231530.jpg

14235799630_a0a9a2be16_o.jpg

14414453001_443d5b5622_o.jpg

14236401549_f19b1bf43b_o.jpg

It has also been reported to massively reduce stuttering. Remember this is still very early in development. Once he manages to unlock certain files, we will have access to all of e3 2012 shaders/effects.
 
Looks great, but as long as the game still stutters like crazy when driving it doesn't mean jack shit to us.

With textures and shadows on high I was able to run the game without stuttering 99% of the time. Enabling those new effects might change that though. :/

edit: Would be great if the modder could improve things! (For shame Ubi)
 

MaLDo

Member
That sharpening is something they've applied after resampling the screenshots right?

Maybe you're talking about road texture shimmering. Stutter fix for the moment implies mess with mipmaps so a lot of shimmering will appear mainly in bump layer over roads.

By the way, dynamic bokeh dof minimizes a lot of that shimmering in the distance. I'm testing with ultra textures without mips for a lot of elements but creating new ultra textures with mips only for those more problematics textures so shimmering will be less visible. Only with that change, I can play with a lot of ultra textures without stutter in 2 gb gpu. TheWorse is doing more improvements that could be combined with those textures for a better experience.

By the way, his shaders improvements, at least for my case, don't affect performance for the worse. Instead, he's doing great optimizations using lower detail lod for distance in combination with dynamic DOF to hide those distant cuts. It's a good work.
 

Lulubop

Member
Maybe you're talking about road texture shimmering. Stutter fix for the moment implies mess with mipmaps so a lot of shimmering will appear mainly in bump layer over roads.

By the way, dynamic bokeh dof minimizes a lot of that shimmering in the distance. I'm testing with ultra textures without mips for a lot of elements but creating new ultra textures with mips only for those more problematics textures so shimmering will be less visible. Only with that change, I can play with a lot of ultra textures without stutter in 2 gb gpu. TheWorse is doing more improvements that could be combined with those textures for a better experience.

By the way, his shaders improvements, at least for my case, don't affect performance for the worse. Instead, he's doing great optimizations using lower detail lod for distance in combination with dynamic DOF to hide those distant cuts. It's a good work.

MaLDo approved, now I'm excited.
 
Maybe you're talking about road texture shimmering. Stutter fix for the moment implies mess with mipmaps so a lot of shimmering will appear mainly in bump layer over roads.

By the way, dynamic bokeh dof minimizes a lot of that shimmering in the distance. I'm testing with ultra textures without mips for a lot of elements but creating new ultra textures with mips only for those more problematics textures so shimmering will be less visible. Only with that change, I can play with a lot of ultra textures without stutter in 2 gb gpu. TheWorse is doing more improvements that could be combined with those textures for a better experience.

By the way, his shaders improvements, at least for my case, don't affect performance for the worse. Instead, he's doing great optimizations using lower detail lod for distance in combination with dynamic DOF to hide those distant cuts. It's a good work.

Sounds amazing! I'll definitely check out the next release.
 

Buburibon

Member
You guys should definitely check it out. While the DOF on foot is a tad aggressive for my taste, the lighting is just so much better. I mean, I was driving around just now and the lighting in the tunnels and in the downtown core is very much improved. Please do interject if you believe I'm imagining this, but I don't think I am.
 

cripterion

Member
Here's a couple screenies using the mod:

It has also been reported to massively reduce stuttering. Remember this is still very early in development. Once he manages to unlock certain files, we will have access to all of e3 2012 shaders/effects.

Damn!
How? and why UBI? I'm so confused lol
 

finalflame

Member
Really digging the changes, and with minimal performance hits on my 780 Ti @ 1440p. Stuttering even seems reduced. I think I'll bite the bullet and play it like this @ 1080p on my TV instead, should then be buttery.

Also hoping for an optimization patch from Ubi, though.
 

Serandur

Member
It has also been reported to massively reduce stuttering. Remember this is still very early in development. Once he manages to unlock certain files, we will have access to all of e3 2012 shaders/effects.

Really digging the changes, and with minimal performance hits on my 780 Ti @ 1440p. Stuttering even seems reduced. I think I'll bite the bullet and play it like this @ 1080p on my TV instead, should then be buttery.

Also hoping for an optimization patch from Ubi, though.

Ubisoft... just... I don't even remotely understand. At all.
 

kudoboi

Member
Anyone had this happen? Don't think it's my videocard as other games work without issues. It's locked to the checkpoint though so exiting the game and coming back doesn't fix it :/ Hard to finish the chase to see if it'll fix itself.

Yeah I had something similar to this yesterday. Except everything was pink instead of red.

This game also constantly crashes my gpu. I have tried 14.4 and 14.6 beta drivers from AMD. 14.4 gives me bsod after 40 minutes and 14.6 crashes the game every 20 minutes. Switching on the air conditioner helps but it still crashes even when the pc isn't that hot... Just less often. Tried a driver reinstall and that did not help.

It is mind boggling how ubi has not released a patch after so long.

Edit: will try that mod later too. Does it affect performance?
 

Jibbed

Member
I think this deserves it's own thread guys, pretty big news that the files were there all along.

I would post it but I'm not 100% read-up on it yet.

Edit: Fuck it, I'm going in!
 
Really digging the changes, and with minimal performance hits on my 780 Ti @ 1440p. Stuttering even seems reduced. I think I'll bite the bullet and play it like this @ 1080p on my TV instead, should then be buttery.

Also hoping for an optimization patch from Ubi, though.

What kind of performance are you getting? I have a ti and i53570k and it jumps around from the 30s-60s seemingly at random while driving around. Locking it to 30 isn't perfect either though because it then randomly drops down 27 every now and again :/ That is with Ultra/TXAA though

Is usually completely steady at 60 when indoors while on a mission.
 

Dr Dogg

Member
I know some people never leave the confines of GAF or other communities but on Ubi's forums they say they have identified the problem and a fix is on its way regards to stuttering.

http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.ph...unplayable?p=10034755&viewfull=1#post10034755

There was another post by another mod in that thread saying they expected it by the end of last week but that seems to have been deleted. So it's back to watching and waiting.

Though from MaLDo's and the person over at Guru digging into this as well as what officially gets done fingers crossed this gets sorted soon.
 
Here's a couple screenies using the mod:

It has also been reported to massively reduce stuttering. Remember this is still very early in development. Once he manages to unlock certain files, we will have access to all of e3 2012 shaders/effects.

How did you get rid of that ever-present DoF?
 

dmr87

Member
Ubisoft simply does not give a shit. When was the last game with performance issues they actually fixed??

Nope. If you're counting on a patch to solve your performance issues, I suggest keeping your expectations in check. I think what we are seeing with watchdogs is similar to Ass Creed 3. Just FYI, none of the patches that they released on that game helped with the performance

I'm just wondering cause they confirmed that a patch is in the works, https://twitter.com/SebViard/status/472036622171930624
 

xXBaconXx

Banned
I can totally see why some of these graphical effects aren't normally in the game.

The headlight shadows are very obviously of a lower quality than the regular shadows. It's a pretty stark contrast, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's an "unfinished" effect. Also, the DoF is clearly not usable during regular gameplay. You can't see more than 10 meters in front of you, and the adaption to different distances it just slow as hell. I can't comment on the other effects because I honstely haven't noticed them yet.

kinda unrelated but is the patch ubi is working on going to fix mouse aiming ?

Probably not. I obviously don't know for certain, but looking at past games it sounds highly unlikely. All Ubisoft games released in the past years has had negative mouse acceleration out the ass, and I can't remember it being fixed for any of them.
 
Probably not. I obviously don't know for certain, but looking at past games it sounds highly unlikely. All Ubisoft games released in the past years has had negative mouse acceleration out the ass, and I can't remember it being fixed for any of them.

that sucks
i don't remember shitty mouse controls ever being patched out by a fan either so i guess i shouldn't hope for a mod or something
 

xXBaconXx

Banned
that sucks
i don't remember shitty mouse controls ever being patched out by a fan either so i guess i shouldn't hope for a mod or something

The mouse acceleration in Far Cry 3 was fixable with a tool that some guy developed, so there might be hope. It's obviously very unlikely though, which sucks.
 
The headlight shadows are very obviously of a lower quality than the regular shadows.
...
Also, the DoF is clearly not usable during regular gameplay. You can't see more than 10 meters in front of you, and the adaption to different distances it just slow as hell.

Actually dynamic shadows from all light sources are identical as far as I can tell. Check out light posts on the road - same, exactly.

Calibrating DoF is an hour long task. If you aim a little higher up, you'll notice the DoF working correctly, so it's just the modder's problem, not the developers.
 

xXBaconXx

Banned
Actually dynamic shadows from all light sources are identical as far as I can tell. Check out light posts on the road - same, exactly.

I'd say they're different. The shadows from the headlights are way too sharp, and they might not even be a perfect match to Aidens body.
jnFqM5S.jpg



About the DoF, yeah it might be fixable. However, considering that the "mod" is just changing a couple of digits in a file there are probably severe limitations to what you can do. It might be that you can't go any further than on/off. And no disrespect to him, but it doesn't really seem like TheWorse would know how to do anything advanced; he even said himself that he's a novice.

EDIT: Well, judging from what he said about 0.7 update I was wrong. I'm glad I was, though.
 
I'd say they're different. The shadows from the headlights are way too sharp, and they might not even be a perfect match to Aidens body.
jnFqM5S.jpg



About the DoF, yeah it might be fixable. However, considering that the "mod" is just changing a couple of digits in a file there are probably severe limitations to what you can do. It might be that you can't go any further than on/off. And no disrespect to him, but it doesn't really seem like TheWorse would know how to do anything advanced; he even said himself that he's a novice.

we should be given the option to have the shadows be either SHARP like on the left, or dithered and smooth like on the right.

I'll ask the guy in the Guru3D thread and I'll use these screenshots to illustrate and maybe there can be a solution? They look so different ingame it can be a bit jarring.
 

xXBaconXx

Banned
we should be given the option to have the shadows be either SHARP like on the left, or dithered and smooth like on the right.

I'll ask the guy in the Guru3D thread and I'll use these screenshots to illustrate and maybe there can be a solution? They look so different ingame it can be a bit jarring.

You're free to do so, but as I said, I'm not sure that there's anything that can be done about it. Again: so far this mod is nothing more than changing digits in a file.
 
Top Bottom