Watch Dogs AMD & NVIDIA GPU Performance Preview @ [H]

Maybe it's just the fact that I've seen it so recently, but I'm imagining an Ocean's 11 moment right now where nvidia, ubisoft, and AMD are getting together and laughing at how people will need to buy new, expensive GPUs to play this game while distracting the masses with reports about nvidia proprietary code being used.

On a serious note, I'd imagine we'll be seeing SOMETHING done about the video ram requirements. This does make me glad I've not decided to go for any higher res than my current 1920x1200 monitor with a 7970 if it's an indicator of things to come.
 
The only thing that's annoying me about the game currently is being restricted in roaming because I'll "fail" a mission if I move too far.
 
Wow so I was looking at that fps chart on page 3 of the review. It looks like Nvidia is starting to have some serious stutter problems - even on their high end cards. My 460 and a friend's 460 have both been getting broken drivers for a year now. I'm not so sure Nvidia is going to be around much longer if they don't get their act together.
 
Blacklash said:
The only thing that's annoying me about the game currently is being restricted in roaming because I'll "fail" a mission if I move too far.
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Yes but u can hit ESC and abort the mission at anytime. Then you can roam where ever you want to. Then go and restart the mission.

This game is awesome! I would recommend 16Gb of ram,and a good CPU. This is one of the best games in quite sometime! And no one has been able to pull it off, but they actually out did GTA by a long shot! Good driving physics, and good shooting.

You do not need that great of a video card. This GTX 660 All settings "Ultra" 2XMSAA/ 16X AF/ High Textures, High shadows. Runs perfect! Hop in a car, drive as fast as you want from one side of the map to the other smashing in to cars, and whatever! And not a single skip! And it looks great. I run the same setting with my GTX 780 Classified, accept for Ultra shadows, and High textures.

This game does not need any optimization. It just needs a 4GB video card to max it out! And Newegg sells 4Gb video cards for $200 bucks and they have been for years now, everyone just fought tooth and nail that it was never needed, so no one bought one! a GTX 760 4GB refurbished. With unlocked voltage and good clocks it will easily out do a GTX 680 and a GTX 770.

2GB video card is kind of like a really fast swapped 2 door Honda! It works for now, but you may have kids in the future and are forced to sell it! And a 4 door swapped fast Honda, is a little heavier but! Still fast if done right! And you do not need to sell it. : )
 
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burned-ati said:
Yes but u can hit ESC and abort the mission at anytime. Then you can roam where ever you want to. Then go and restart the mission.

This game is awesome! I would recommend 16Gb of ram,and a good CPU. This is one of the best games in quite sometime! And no one has been able to pull it off, but they actually out did GTA by a long shot! Good driving physics, and good shooting.

You do not need that great of a video card. This GTX 660 All settings "Ultra" 2XMSAA/ 16X AF/ High Textures, High shadows. Runs perfect! Hop in a car, drive as fast as you want from one side of the map to the other smashing in to cars, and whatever! And not a single skip! And it looks great. I run the same setting with my GTX 780 Classified, accept for Ultra shadows, and High textures.

This game does not need any optimization. It just needs a 4GB video card to max it out! And Newegg sells 4Gb video cards for $200 bucks. a GTX 760 4GB refurbished. With unlocked voltage and good clocks it will easily out do a GTX 680 and a GTX 770.
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My PC gets 14060 in fire strike extreme and a solid 130 fps minimum at 1440p ultra in bf4 and a solid 120fps in crysis 3 ultra and gets anywhere from 90 fps to single digit fps in watchdogs....
 
On the subject of Temporal SMAA courtesy of the NV website:

Temporal SMAA: Offers identical anti-aliasing properties as SMAA, with the addition of a temporal anti-aliasing filter, which reduces the unsightly movement of anti-aliased surfaces. Compared to TXAA the effect is understandably inferior, but for those without the necessary GPU performance Temporal SMAA is an excellent alternative.

lol at the TXAA plug. :p
 
Blacklash said:
The only thing that's annoying me about the game currently is being restricted in roaming because I'll "fail" a mission if I move too far.
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Same thing happens in another dog-name-based game, "Sleeping Dogs". If you're in a fight and you stray too fight, then you fail that mission as well. :(
 
burned-ati said:
Yes but u can hit ESC and abort the mission at anytime. Then you can roam where ever you want to. Then go and restart the mission.

This game is awesome! I would recommend 16Gb of ram,and a good CPU. This is one of the best games in quite sometime! And no one has been able to pull it off, but they actually out did GTA by a long shot! Good driving physics, and good shooting.

You do not need that great of a video card. This GTX 660 All settings "Ultra" 2XMSAA/ 16X AF/ High Textures, High shadows. Runs perfect! Hop in a car, drive as fast as you want from one side of the map to the other smashing in to cars, and whatever! And not a single skip! And it looks great. I run the same setting with my GTX 780 Classified, accept for Ultra shadows, and High textures.

This game does not need any optimization. It just needs a 4GB video card to max it out! And Newegg sells 4Gb video cards for $200 bucks and they have been for years now, everyone just fought tooth and nail that it was never needed, so no one bought one! a GTX 760 4GB refurbished. With unlocked voltage and good clocks it will easily out do a GTX 680 and a GTX 770.

2GB video card is kind of like a really fast swapped 2 door Honda! It works for now, but you may have kids in the future and are forced to sell it! And a 4 door swapped fast Honda, is a little heavier but! Still fast if done right! And you do not need to sell it. : )
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Thanks for the tip.
 
niconx said:
Wow so I was looking at that fps chart on page 3 of the review. It looks like Nvidia is starting to have some serious stutter problems - even on their high end cards. My 460 and a friend's 460 have both been getting broken drivers for a year now. I'm not so sure Nvidia is going to be around much longer if they don't get their act together.
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How long do you want Nvidia to support old shit? That card is 4 years old and was never a high end card to start with.
 
schizrade said:
How long do you want Nvidia to support old shit? That card is 4 years old and was never a high end card to start with.
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He said broken drivers, not "I expect this game to run at 100FPS in ultra mode with a GTX 460." I had a GTX 460 until about 6 months ago and I also had tons of issues with drivers so broken that I often had to reboot the computer to wake up the display after it went to sleep - or after I had used RDP to access my computer (but then wanted to log back in to the physical machine). Black screen. Completely unacceptable. They'll claim a driver has support for the card without doing any testing at all. And, frankly, how do they even manage to screw stuff up that would work on Microsoft's generic video drivers? The screen won't wake up? Seriously, that's an issue we have to deal with? In WHQL drivers? Reminds me of idiots who release custom ROMs for phones they don't own and cannot test with and then seem surprised when people brick their phone as a result. The difference? We actually give Nvidia money and they need to get their act together.

I sure as hell expect non-broken drivers for more than 4 years, and the situation with my 460 was downright unacceptable.

Windows XP came out in 2001 and they just stopped supporting that. 4 years is not an acceptable timeframe to drop hardware out of the "working drivers" category.
 
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I was wondering about high vs. ultra textures, but the review says: Is there a difference in the image quality between "High" and "Ultra" textures? There is definitely a difference in image quality, "Ultra" textures are noticeably better. We will have lots of image quality comparisons later today.

More than just image quality comparisons, I'd like to see a 1080p video on YouTube showing both high textures and ultra textures. If possible, show the videos side-by-side. TIA.
 
Youtube compression will kill the details, so you won't see much difference. Better to look at pngs.
 
Simplex said:
Youtube compression will kill the details, so you won't see much difference. Better to look at pngs.
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Yeah, if you want a video it will have to be at a very high bitrate (if not lossless - but that would be more of an EXTREME bitrate) to be useful for this purpose. Youtube is nowhere near good enough.
 
Yeah, like mega.co.nz.
Although I think you can stream good quality video on dropbox.
 
... Does this game really look that good? I saw a screenshot someone posted and the graphics look... bad. I mean not even really remotely good. Forget mouthwatering, it's not even really a contest. Crysis 2 looked better (and Crysis might give it a run for its money?). Am I missing something?

I think that whatever vram requirements it has are totally related to how poorly it's coded. This should not need to break 2GB vram, let alone 3GB.
 
The higher res you are playing at the more Ultra textures make a difference. I couldn't settle for High textures at 3440x1440 so I swapped my 780 for a 290X... game runs nicely now, no stuttering. VRAM usage is around 3.7GB... so 4GB seems to be the sweet spot for this res.
 
Simplex said:
Yeah, lossles png compression completely murders the details to death :rolleyes:
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Indeed. Uncompressed images should be banned from internet. I can think about any reason to not use png over bmp.

Almost just as annoying as when people use jpg when png would have produced same or smaller file size yet lossless quality.
 
Reinstalled the game on my ssd, reinstalled the new cats, disable page file completely and removed crossfire. Now it's a solid 45 fps at 1440p on ultra 2xmsaa. A stuttering mess a for me with tri fire though still.
 
According to to HardOCP, MSAA works poorly in this game and leaves many aliased edges.
 
Does it seem nVidia is being very... um... un-nVidia like lately? First the Titan-Z vs. 295x2 and now with Watchdogs needing more VRAM than their high end cards offer. Not like them to miscalculate like this. Or, has something happened at AMD lately that they are one step ahead? Just an observation.

Good report as always here. The best review site out there, IMO. I hope you guys get your hands on a Titan-Z so we can see how it really performs in actual game play. :cool:
 
Simplex said:
Requiring more than 3GB VRAM for Ultra textures is either laziness or lack of programming skills on the developers part.
I tried ultra and I didn't see any awesome super high resolution textures that would require such MASSIVE amounts of memory. Textures on ultra are simply good - what I would expect from 2014 AAA game. And my 780Ti is too weak for them? Really?

On high the textures look UGLY, like it's 2004:
http://i.imgur.com/T40A2fs.jpg

I am surprised that [H] does not criticize devs for these absurd requirements. There is a difference between "demanding" and "unoptimized" - Crysis 3 is a demanding game, but it rewards your powerful hardware with great graphics. Watch dogs is not demanding, it is simply horribly unoptimized. I just bought 780Ti assuming I will be able to play all games on the highest settings in 1080p with 60fps - and I could, until watch dogs (ironically, watch dogs was one of the main reason that I upgraded my card from 770 to 780Ti).

And we all know why the game requires over 3GB for ultra textures - the consoles. They have unified 8GB memory (around 5GB is available to the developers) so Ubi just optimised their game for the consoles where they don't have to worry about moving data between RAM and video card because it is unified. And what about PC gamers? Well, they can just go buy a 4GB card, so why bother optimising? Great work Ubi!
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I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that the VRAM requirements are due to the game being "unoptimized" or a "lack of programming skills" from the developer? I was under the impression that the only way to reduce this (besides some sort of compression) would be to use smaller textures(high) or use less unique textures in a scene. What kind of optimizations were you envisaging that didn't involve a loss of texture quality?

The Crysis comparisons are just pointless we may as well be comparing an RTS.

I get the feeling you're annoyed your card can't play on the highest settings therefore the game = unoptimized and the requirements = absurd.
 
Yes I am annoyed, but if I have one of the fastest nvidia cards in existence that I paid 800$ (yay for taxes in Europe) for and the game that does not amaze visually in any respect is performing poorly, then it is a sign of poor optimization, plain and simple.
If this game was redefining the quality of graphics then high requirements would be justified and I would not complain, like I never complained about Crysis 3 performance.

So there are three factors at play
1) I have one of the fasters video cards there are
2) Watch Dogs looks good, but does not blow out of the water graphically, does not push the boundaries, does not offer unprecedented gaphics quality, etc, etc.
3) Watch Dogs runs poorly on my card

These three factors occurring at the same time lead me to the conclusion that the game is very poorly optimized. There is no justification for such high requirements.

Also, there are ways to optimize memory requirements - like texture streaming, or popup. Also, putting textures that do not fit into RAM, not into swap file seems like a no brainer - and yet gamers are forced to disable swap file to reduce stutter. Does that sound like programming competence to you?

OK, maybe you are right I am unreasonably annoyed? I do not have enough video memory card on my card, a measly 3GB. So I found a review by TotalBiscuit who has two 6GB Titans in SLI - and guess what? He is also complaining about poor performance and bad optimization! Gee, what a surprise!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBb2BIVrV7
 
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One could only imagine what state this game was in last year when ubi$oft pushed the release date back at the last second!
 
AllBlackFan said:
I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that the VRAM requirements are due to the game being "unoptimized" or a "lack of programming skills" from the developer? I was under the impression that the only way to reduce this (besides some sort of compression) would be to use smaller textures(high) or use less unique textures in a scene.
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Not necessarily. I suspect what's happening here is that the engine has a renderer front-end whose resource management is tuned for the consoles. Rather than releasing unused resources, it just hangs on to them. The game pretty much just soaks up whatever memory is available, and in Direct3D, active resources will automatically page out to RAM and, failing that, to disk when GPU memory is exhausted.

This is a good thing when you have a lot of memory to play with — as the consoles do — but it can be problematic when memory is more limited. The front-end may be difficult to tune per-platform, so a fix may not necessarily be in store at any point.

An optimization here would be to use virtualization, which is less an optimization than it is a completely different resource paradigm.
 
Like I said, lazy console port. Previously consoles had 512MB, now they have 8GB so prepare your wallet and embrace the new and improved requirements of 4GB VRAM.
 
I think there is a system ram leak for this game. When I start playing, my system is using 6 gigs of ram. After playing 1.5 hours last night, the ram usage went up to 9.5 gigs. I am coming from 16 gigs of system ram and 290s in crossfire.
 
Simplex said:
Youtube compression will kill the details, so you won't see much difference. Better to look at pngs.
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Yes, I know what you mean, compression issues (not to mention YT tops out at 1080p whereas this reviewer is using 1600p). But I figure if the texture difference is that noticeable, even in a compressed 1080p video, it should show up.

I'm thinking of a video that was on YT I think late last year that showed the same game being played on PS3 and PS4 (split screen) and it was clearly noticeable how much better the PQ/VQ was on the PS4 side of the video vs. the PS3 side.
 
I'm quite surprised that an Nvidia sponsored title is running this poorly on their top tier gaming card. Either is was a massive miscalculation on their part because they're stupid, or you'd have to think other factors came into play that are causing issues with the performance. Consider this, NV and UBI are saying 3GB for Ultra textures, so they must have thought it would work fine based on testing they did. Now it's out in the wild and it sucks... That doesn't look good for either of them, especially NV that now has their flagship gaming card getting beat up by AMD's on one of "their" titles. hehe... I expect things will improve via game performance patches and driver updates.

Until then, I just won't be buying the game.
 
To all those who try to defend ubi about the vram requirements. Ubi themselves acknowledges this is an issue and are investigating it:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/243470/discussions/0/540743032548687853/ said:
- PC - Frame rate stutter on high end GPU

Game stutters on ultra textures and other lower settings on certain hardware.

[Status] Issue reported - updates to follow
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Read that carefully, that doesn't say it's an "issue" that just says the issue from feedback has been reported. "Updates to follow" could just mean better explanation of how it works. It doesn't mean it is an issue they can fix right out. I await the updates to follow.
 
Brent_Justice said:
Read that carefully, that doesn't say it's an "issue" that just says the issue from feedback has been reported. "Updates to follow" could just mean better explanation of how it works. It doesn't mean it is an issue they can fix right out. I await the updates to follow.
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Sebastien Viard said:
Watch Dogs can use 3+ GB of RAM on NG consoles for graphics, your PC GPU needs enough VRAM for ultra options due to the lack of unified mem
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Watch Dogs tech director addresses the issue pretty well. The game is a ram hog even on consoles which use lower resolution and "high" textures. Having unified memory gives them a lot more flexibility in how much can be loaded up. The more I read about this the more the stuttering issue is simply pointing to a lack of ram. As texture resolution goes up ram requirements skyrocket. Devs now have more ram on consoles so they are no longer as limited when designing games and can shoot for high res assets. We might see more of these issues pop up over time because of this.

Do you have any plans to do any testing with a Titan? I am curious to see what kind of gains might be realized from having 6GB of VRam.
 
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