Watch Dogs PC System Reqs. - Next-Gen Is Here?

Only reason I didn't go GMG this time was I wanted a Steam key and not just a Uplay key... from what I could tell, Amazon and GMG only gave out Uplay keys. I could be mistaken however.

 

Does it matter? You still have to use Uplay to play it.
I personally don't bother with new Ubisoft games on Steam.

 

I don't use Uplay other than when it loads when I start a game that needs it.

I like having my games in one spot for easy install when I'm moving between machines. With Steam, it's easy, all one big list, no games get lost in the shuffle. Otherwise, I often totally forget about games... out of sight out of mind ha

Also, I'm a big fan of Steam in-home streaming, which is totally seamless with Steam games, yet hit or miss adding third party games. Even though WatchDogs uses Uplay, it loads first through Steam which activates the streaming properly.

Simply my personal preference

 

Oh so GMG Watch Dogs key can't be activated on Steam?

 

I don't understand the necessity of having a Steam key when the game requires Uplay to even play. What does it matter where it comes from? w/e

I'm trying to optimize it with my 485m ;P

No, not unless Uplay goes away and they give everyone keys to steam....which I don't see happening in the foreseeable future.

 

See my previous post... different strokes for different folks

HT, it's only a UPlay key from GMG or Amazon.

 

Memory usage from Gamegpu.ru

 

Well for the first time I'm glad the 780M came with 4GB of vRAM lol

 

SLI users, check this out. Using the Far Cry 3 or Assassin's Creed III bits gives a noticeable performance boost over the default Watch_Dogs SLI profile in the driver.

Watch Dogs Performance | SLI Improvements - PC Gaming - Linus Tech Tips

Hooray for another sh*tty SLI profile from Nvidia! It seems like I have to use unofficial bits for every other game nowadays to ensure proper scaling.

 

RIP 7970M and 680M 2GB owners.

3GB/4GB should become standard imo. More and more games seems to cross the 2GB barrier.
Titanfall and Watchdogs are two recent games where 3GB+ is required to function optimal

 

I'd like to see more how the game runs with people's rigs and importantly..what the TEMPS are. Some of these sandbox games that are ported really stress these GPUs (Far Cry III, GTA-IV etc). I never really bought into the hype with this game but if it performs well I would prefer to get it for the PC over the PS4. If it's a bad port, I may as well get it for the PS4.

 

While I agree with this for the Ultra/MAX/HighAA/HD+just has to have everything turned on max crowd, it still runs just fine on 2GB for the rest of us on high

 

lol, when i was buying this 680M 4GB i was wondering what's the point of having so much memory? probably just a marketing gimmick by Nvidia because people think higher memory makes the GPU better but guess this memory is useful now

 

Well 860M maxwell in most laptops are 2gigs, should buyers go for 870M ? good question..

 

The real question is if even an 860m 4GB is powerful enough to run at Ultra details required by the higher vRAM requirement?

 

Yeah you are right, my post was targeted toward the "ultra crowd".
Still think everyone should aim for the highest setting when buying a high end card though. But I guess there are people who prefer 60FPS flat too and some cards can`t do 60FPS and Ultra

Good point.
GTX 860M is slightly slower than GTX 660 so we are maybe looking at 34FPS with Ultra details with 860M. Pass as playable I guess?

 

Well I run mostly all high bar one setting on ultra can't remember which with SMAA. The fps are all over the show but probably average in the 40s. The game looks nice but feels like it needs a patch. Vram is maxed. Temps are fine at 82C on a laptop cooler.

Your not gonna get ultra playable on a 860m unfortunately.

 

@ Mardon

Thank you for answering my question with the temps included. Ubisoft isn't on my top list of playable games after playing Far Cry III. Some of their games is like running a constant benchmark on my GPUs. Sounds like it plays relatively well at 82* with pretty good FPS for your rig.

 

I just set to High, except high textures and was running at about 35-40FPS with 860m 2GB.

 

Can't wait to get this game when I receive my notebook! What settings is everyone running on? I am most likely getting something with an 860m or a little lesser

 

im running on ultra at 1080p with FXAA, running very well so far 40-50's for fps, on two heavily overclocked 770m's

 

Nice. One complaint I am reading is the controls; especially when driving. It seems like many are switching to console controllers. Does anyone know if there are console Vs PC comparisons regarding graphics settings? If the PS4 has a "high" equivalent then I may just go for the PS4 for convenience and play on the big screen Vs maybe Ultra settings on the notebook. Sure I can hook up my 18 to the big screen but it's simply not worth the hassle for me. Now if the PS4 is running 'medium' settings compared to the PC High/Ultra, I will probably veer toward getting the PC version. This almost seems like a game geared more toward the consoles and I am not quite sure the game will catch on big enough with the PC modding community to make it worth the purchase. GTA IV with the ICE mod is just awesome but it had a community and user base that supported such dedicated efforts. This game is looking to be more hype than anything and may be a bargain buy for me. I still have yet to get Titanfall which looks to be my next purchase. I'll let a few more user reviews come to NBR and other review sites at the moment. Still seems that this game is scaling relatively well which is a good thing for us notebook users.

 

Get it for what you want to play it on... it's more of a console "feely" game for me without a doubt. It's good, not great, and borrows a ton from the GTA series. Fun game, and probably would play better with a controller, but I've only had time to use mouse/keyboard which feels clunky at time. Having said that, it's totally playable with mouse/keyboard, and I'm sure with all the hype, it will be modded in the future.

I personally have stopped buying consoles/console games simply because I hate being locked into playing in a fixed location and never play them (same reason I ditched desktops as well ha); hence notebook gaming is the ultimate solution to me. For others, sitting on a couch in front of the TV all the time is their preferred choice so why bother with mobility.

As far as settings, I've played it on my 780m with great results on high+ settings, and on my 860m with high+/- settings, and honestly, even when I dropped graphics settings down all the way simply out of curiosity, it didn't change my experience one bit. But, graphics aren't my main interest or "thing", so I may be bias.

Get it for where you want to play it, it will play well on either device...

 

ok after playing more, having ultra textures gives me massive stuttering especially when driving or running and turning a lot. Setting this to high helped. Also, the mouse movement is so jerky, doesn't feel right at all. Besides that, so far so good.

 

Lower your settings further and it will smooth out... I finally dropped to medium/high settings out of curiosity and things finally smoothed out control wise with mouse, and even while driving... including the motorcycle. That seriously helped enjoyment of the game, much more than marginally better graphic setting.

Definitely needs better optimization but is at least enjoyable on lower settings.

 

Ya think my PC will run it?
765m SLI
i74700MQ
18.4" 1920x1080 IPS TrueLife
Thanks for helping!

 

Yep.......

 

After a proper driver I would imagine your rig will play at higher settings. SLI 770s...that is a beast. I have read that this game eats Vram and I think the 770s are 2gig per card so that may be somewhat of a bottleneck. However I hear the profiles are not up to par as of yet. Glad you are liking the game thus far.

 

i am getting stuttering with just high textures and my 780M has 4gb of VRAM. but chucking it down to medium textures seems to have alleviated the problem...for now because it's strange that the game's auto detect says i can do high...hmmm....

 

i agree on the driving part, heck GTA 4 had better physics there, to me this class of driving (or lack of) reminds me of sleeping dogs

 

The performance on a single 780m is much better than if I use SLI. Something ain't right.. That's for sure.

 

Did you try the SLI profile for Far Cry 3 (Dunia 2 Engine) or AC III/IV (AnvilNext Engine) yet? The Disrupt Engine used for Watch_Dogs is a hybrid of those two and SLI users have reported improved scaling when using those other games' SLI compatibility bits compared to the default Watch_Dogs SLI profile in the driver.

 

lol.. that downgrade !

 

Yeah I saw your link. I'm dying to try it once I get home.. Sadly not for a long time. What a joke.. Titanfall and now this game

 

No downgrade, that's just an unfounded conspiracy theory. Graphical fidelity in this game swings wildly depending on lighting conditions. Daytime looks pretty bad; nighttime with rain looks spectacular. If you replicate the 2012 E3 demo (exact same video settings, location, time of day) the game now will look exactly the same as it did then if not better.

 

What a load of crock.
The game swings wildly due to poor engine and vram issues and other unknown bugs.
To quote 3dguru:

You can mark my words, Ubisoft is going to release a bunch of zero-day patches as Watch Dogs does not seems to be behaving the way it should with better than HIGH image quality settings. It is very hard to pinpoint exactly what the problem with the game is, but increased frame-buffers do make a big difference indicating there a lot going on in graphics memory.Interestingly enough GTA as an open world game always has had the very same issue and really liked huge framebuffers. But as to why the game needs this much of it is a bit of a riddle. Obviously a large chunk is eaten away by high quality textures and ultra quality settings. But at high quality overall even mid-range cards with 2GB graphics memory are bound to run into some problems IF they have the more exoticAA modes enabled or are gaming in a too high resolutions.

And even they had issues with sli scaling and working quote :

Ultra HD - Well it is simple, even in Multi-GPU modes like the R9 295 and 780 Ti SLI it is a no-go with Ultra image quality as you will run into a freak-fest of stuttering. Here the same rule applies, use High quality settings with High Quality textures. You can play with AA a bit, but we'd suggest you leave it disabled.


Moral of the story this game and wolfenstein have been poorly coded and use engines which as much as we would like to think they are signed off and qa tested are actually still in beta versions. This is what happens when mother company says deliver your deadline.

http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/882353-Watch_Dogs-Known-issues

Here are the known issues with the game.
PC - Frame rate stutter on high end GPU

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


http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/882517-Stuttering-gtx690-unplayable

[Status] Issue reported - updates to follow

That's a joke. Beta version has been released to public. Well played Ubisoft... Well played..:thumbsup:

 

^You pirated game so not sure if serious...

 

LoL you still with that?
I could say to you I have review edition and assisted reviewer to test it but that still wouldn't apply as you and wingnut know all.. As said prior I won't bite and it's pointless trying to justify your argument and will continue to critique your aberrations.

Stay on topic and don't bait...

 

I run that game at either a constant 60fps, 30fps (with vsync), either on ultra or low, either SLI or not (although the issue is slightly less pronounced without SLI), the game still stutters while driving, this is insane, I am running this on a GTX880M SLI setup (by the way, After Burner indicates that the game uses up to 5.3GB of VRAM ! Not that it's a problem since I have 8GB available)
By the way, I am not using any form of memory paging either. That game is in serious need of a patch.

 

i've played a few missions and so far i dont see anything game breaking or unplayable. i play the game on high preset with no motion blur and depth of field and AA off. for the most part i get 30-40 fps when driving around. 40-60 when walking depending on the area. 50-60 indoors. 100+ during cutscenes. 300+fps on main menu. as far as i can tell the game just needs to get a bit more optimized.

 

Actually, unless you have the unlocked vBIOS like us 780M users do (which I don't know if johnksss and svl7 have released yet) your GPU should be clocking up and down all over the place and not be giving you the performance you deserve. But yes, the game is in SERIOUS need of patchES (plural is important!) and it was exactly as I expected and told people would happen. Ubisoft. Cannot. Code. For. PC. Architectures. Their engines can be powerful, their games can look beautiful, their marketing team can work quadriple overtime, their developers can make all the excuses for graphical or framerate downgrades they want... they simply don't know how to take advantage of what's there. Reported CPU usage on the game is through the roof. Despite the whole scandal of users having bitcoin miners installed with their pirated copies, proper reviewers like Total Biscuit and actual gamers I know have shown HUGE performance sinks. TB can't even hit 120fps on minimum settings. He can't maintain 60fps on ultra with two GTX titans + an i7-3930K + 32GB of DDR3 2000MHz RAM. Further to that, SLI 780Ti setups drop under 60 themselves.

And to add to this, nVidia's own test bench for the game used an i7-2600K and SLI Titans and constantly showed under 60fps. But you'd say that their i7-2600K giving them TotalBiscuit's framerate on his i7-3930K means that the CPU isn't as relevant right? Well nope, because nVidia's 2600K in their testing bench is overclocked to 4.8GHz. Yeah. 4.8GHz. Almost nobody is going to be gaming on a 4.8GHz i7-2600K with two Titans or two 780Tis. None of it makes any sense and the only thing I'm seeing is that this game just isn't worth it. Not that it won't be fun or enjoyable to play or whatever... but it, like most recent Ubisoft titles, are just salt in stab wounds to PC users. They need to learn to care for their consumers, and the consumers need to show them as much.

A bit late with a reply here, but BF4, Ghosts (though mostly a joke being included here) Crysis 2 (and by my guess Crysis 3; I don't own it), Arma 2 & expansions, DayZ and Arma 3 & expansions all also cross 2GB in vRAM. In BF4 and Crysis 2, they usually hit about 2200, which isn't much of a difference versus 2GB, but it is worthy of noting that it does. The rest use 2.5GB and upwards (Arma 2/DayZ) easily, and definitely benefit from 3GB/4GB cards.

 

There are tons of graphics settings... gpu buffers , 2 versions on vsync. . Anyone know what a 680m sli set up should be set to ?

Sent from my SM-N900T using Tapatalk

 

Thanks to Octiceps I've got this game running like a champ in SLI by using FarCry 3 compatibility Bits.

View attachment 112581

All maxed except AA on MSAA. This seems to work a treat until Ubisoft and nVidia pull their thumbs out.

Cheers fella

 

Everything on Ultra, except Textures on High.

For AA, try TXAA x2, and if that's too much of a hit on VRAM, lower it to Temporal SMAA.

Since you have 2GB GPUs, either use GPU-Z or MSI Afternurner to monitor the VRAM usage.

V-sync 1 Frame locks the game at 60fps, 2 Frame locks it at 30fps.

 

780M is 4GB, doubt vRAM would be an issue unless you go above 1080p

 

anyone else having trouble connecting to uplay? or any of the ubisoft servers in the game? The best settings so far for my laptop have been everything on Ultra except shadows and textures set to high with FXAA. We need a patch to make sli better.

 

Everything is broken right now

 

Welp, now I feel silly for pre-ordering the Dedsec Edition, from the UK no less. Ah well I'm sure the artbook and steelbook will keep me busy until they release a proper patch lol

 

Yes knocking textures to high from ultra despite having a 3gb card really helps. Game still uses 2.5gb on high.

 

Anyone getting crashing because of 'low memory'. Abit strange I'm using an 880m.