[Multiple Sites] Watch Dogs GPU benchmark roundup

[Majcric]

Ya and you get unplayable game.

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/screenshots/original/2014/05/Watch_Dogs-1080p-Full-HD-4xMSAA-pcgh.png

280X 3GB Gaming = 27.7 fps
770 2GB = 5.9 fps

With Ultra Textures @ 1080P with MSAA, you'd be at 2.5-3GB of VRAM. You can try running Ultra textures without any AA.

From GameGPU: "VRAM should be about 2 gigabytes using the High textures and three gigabytes for ultra mode."

Guru3D's testing revealed the issue before anyone else but most people didn't read their review since they only looked at the charts.

"We then lowered texture quality settings from the Ultra setting (recommended for 3GB graphics cards) towards HIGH (recommended for 2GB graphics cards) to give this card a little more Video memory to fiddle and fool around in. ....So any graphics card with 2GB of memory set at HIGH/HIGH @ 2560x1440, would break down as frames start so swap back and forth in the frame-buffer. With such a card you'd need to be at Full HD / 1920x1080 maximum."

If people only looked at the benchmark scores, they wouldn't see the issues of 780Ti SLI vs. 290X CF.

"Radeon R9 295 does roughly 49 FPS on average in this scene sequence
GeForce GTX 780 Ti SLI does roughly 56 FPS on average in this scene sequence."

780Ti SLI should be clearly faster but FCAT shows a stuttering fest.

In the conclusion, for 2GB mid-range cards:

"So for the mainstream gamers, above a quick run at High Quality settings with high Quality Textures. My recommendation for the guys with a cheaper mid-range 2GB card, switch to high quality settings and FXAA as maximum. Your playable resolution will be be 1920x1080 (Full HD)."
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/watch_dogs_vga_graphics_performance_benchmark_review,9.html

Oh come on RS, 27 is playable to you. it goes back to my original point.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Oh come on RS, 27 is playable to you. it goes back to my original point.

I'd have to see the game in action, but 27.7FPS might be fine. If not, overclock it to 30+FPS, should be easy enough and I imagine 99% of 7970/280X's will reach 1100MHz. You can't overclock an additional GB of memory to a 2GB card, though.

 

[RussianSensation]

Oh come on RS, 27 is playable to you. it goes back to my original point.

No, it's not playable. But imagine 2 scenarios: (1) Someone who has 2x 7970s/R9 280X/7950s and overclocks them? (2) Lower some quality settings but keep the textures at Ultra. With 680/770 2GB SLI, there is enough power but not enough VRAM.

Also, for 780/780Ti users, the problem appears again at 1440P as 3GB of VRAM is breached.

On the positive side, I have a feeling GM204 will come with 4GB/8GB of VRAM and GM210 with 6GB/12. On the AMD side, they'll probably offer 4/8GB R9 390X.

 

[Grooveriding]

I'm pretty surprised at these results. It's always been the case that heavily nvidia TWIMTPB influenced games are ensured to be very biased to nvidia cards and perform much better on them.

How nvidia could of ignored or missed that this game on its best settings is unplayable on all but a small fraction of their installed base of cards is beyond me. They really dropped the ball this time. Even the 7970 makes a joke of the 770 and the R9 290/290X are much better than 780/780ti at high resolutions.

For a TWIMTBP title, Nvidia dropped the ball here big time.

At least this is not happening in a major title that has long term gameplay usage like BF4 or the like, then I'd actually feel like I'd have to replace my cards.

 

[blastingcap]

I'm pretty surprised at these results. It's always been the case that heavily nvidia TWIMTPB influenced games are ensured to be very biased to nvidia cards and perform much better on them.

How nvidia could of ignored or missed that this game on its best settings is unplayable on all but a small fraction of their installed base of cards is beyond me. They really dropped the ball this time. Even the 7970 makes a joke of the 770 and the R9 290/290X are much better than 780/780ti at high resolutions.

For a TWIMTBP title, Nvidia dropped the ball here big time.

At least this is not happening in a major title that has long term gameplay usage like BF4 or the like, then I'd actually feel like I'd have to replace my cards.

NV's driver team is regarded as more skilled than AMD's and I doubt they dropped the ball. More likely, the game as optimized for consoles which are built on GCN architecture, which AMD's desktop PC video cards are also built on.

 

[Leadbox]

NV's driver team is regarded as more skilled than AMD's and I doubt they dropped the ball. More likely, the game as optimized for consoles which are built on architecture, which AMD's desktop PC video cards are also built on.

Don't know about more skilled, but there certainly is a tonne more of them

 

[Attic]

I'm finding that on an i3-4330 I can get away with ultra textures and high settings (HBAO+ High) and do 40+fps a large majority of the time at 1080P on the 290x. Definately not a locked to 60fps like I like so i'm considering i5, but the game doesn't really seem worth it.

On 8gb system memory i'm getting system memory warnings and drops from game, random game crashes, uplay down and spotty.

Overall not too happy with the games delivery. It's got a lot of crashes as reported by other users and uPlay is bad. Most likely will be fixed soon, but this should be better at launch.


Id say you want i7 3.2ghz or better, 16gb RAM and 780ti/290x or better GPU to move beyond High Texture High settings. 1080P 60fps vysnc.

 

[Carfax83]

How nvidia could of ignored or missed that this game on its best settings is unplayable on all but a small fraction of their installed base of cards is beyond me. They really dropped the ball this time. Even the 7970 makes a joke of the 770 and the R9 290/290X are much better than 780/780ti at high resolutions.

For a TWIMTBP title, Nvidia dropped the ball here big time.

Talk about exaggeration.. NVidia is outperforming AMD by a considerable degree in this game bar the VRAM issues.. The 4GB GTX 770 performs better than the R290 according to the PCgameshardware benchmarks for instance, and on NVidia hardware you get much better multithreaded performance from your CPU.

 

[Grooveriding]

<snip> bar the VRAM issues..<snip>

Yup, so long as you have an nvidia card with 4GB+ VRAM if you want to run max settings you're okay. Otherwise you're SOL.

 

[3DVagabond]

[H]ard even found that the 780 & 780ti are stuttering and providing much lower minimum frames than the 290/290X with the ultra textures.

Right now R9 290/290X are offering the best experience on maxed settings in the game unless you are using a Titan or 6GB 780. Pretty sad.

If you go out and buy a pair of Titan Blacks I'll taunt you.

 

[moonbogg]

Holy crap guys...Titan Z to the rescue for this game! The card suddenly makes sense.

 

[parvadomus]

wow nvidia cant rule their own games, looks like the red team is kicking [redacted]!

You know the rules about flamebait and swearing in VC&G. I'm surprised your last vacation didn't gain you any wisdom.

-Elfear

 

[Attic]

Changing to high textures from Ultra textures appears to have fixed my system memory warnings and game crashes.

 

[Majcric]

wow nvidia cant rule their own games, looks like the red team is kicking ass!

I don't think either camp is ruling this game.

 

[Majcric]

Changing to high textures from Ultra textures appears to have fixed my system memory warnings and game crashes.

Yeah I'm wondering if a memory leak is still happening. I'm waiting on some ram to arrive before I even test it.

 

[wilds]

Playing this on my laptop and quite impressed by the gameplay so far. Since my 650m has 1gb of vram, the textures option is locked at medium and memory usage has peaked at ~ 980mb. I am GPU bottlenecked about 100% of the time, even when underclocking the CPU as low as 2.5 GHz. This game is much more optimized than GTA IV (released a long time ago lol) while still having better graphics.

At 1070/2670 I get a minimum of ~35 fps on low-medium settings at 1080p. Not fantastic, but perfectly playable.

I hooked up my 32" 720p TV to see the performance improvements, but the game looks terrible even with high settings at 720p. At 720p, I can easily get 35fps+ with 4x msaa and medium settings, but I think most people would go with fxaa+1080p for this game.

Anyone getting Rivatuner to work with this? FRAPS works fine though.

 

[Whitestar127]

Yup, so long as you have an nvidia card with 4GB+ VRAM if you want to run max settings you're okay. Otherwise you're SOL.

Should be interesting to test that, but 60€? Hmmm, wondering if I should just let my brain do a Cartman and hibernate until it goes on sale. Already waiting for GTAV so why not this as well.

 

[2is]

Should be interesting to test that, but 60€? Hmmm, wondering if I should just let my brain do a Cartman and hibernate until it goes on sale. Already waiting for GTAV so why not this as well.

Seems lately I'm more of a game collector than a game player... My backlog currently stands at:

Skyrim (haven't started)
Witcher 2 (haven't started)
Sleeping Dogs (couple hours into it)
Arkham Origins (1 hour into it)
Tomb Raider (haven't started)
Rage (1 hour into it)

And these are just the games I do intend to play/finish at some point. If you're anything like me, waiting shouldn't be a problem. Watch Dogs and AC: Black Flag are two more that will be added to the list when the price is right. I'm in no rush.

 

[Deders]

Seems lately I'm more of a game collector than a game player... My backlog currently stands at:

Skyrim (haven't started)
Witcher 2 (haven't started)
Sleeping Dogs (couple hours into it)
Arkham Origins (1 hour into it)
Tomb Raider (haven't started)
Rage (1 hour into it)

And these are just the games I do intend to play/finish at some point. If you're anything like me, waiting shouldn't be a problem. Watch Dogs and AC: Black Flag are two more that will be added to the list when the price is right. I'm in no rush.

Personally I'd swap those lists around, IMO Tomb raider, Witcher 2 and Skyrim are the better games. Tomb raider is probably the easiest to get into immediately.

 

[Rezist]

I want to get this game but I despise Uplay, I wish ubisoft could just adopt steam fully.

 

[Grooveriding]

Can confirm [H]ard's results. Game is a stutterfest with Ultra textures. You cannot even run High textures with MSAA, it still stutters. High textures+SMAA is the best you can manage at resolutions higher than 1080p with a 3GB card.

I wouldn't want to play this one on a 2GB card.

 

[Majcric]

No, it's not playable. But imagine 2 scenarios: (1) Someone who has 2x 7970s/R9 280X/7950s and overclocks them? (2) Lower some quality settings but keep the textures at Ultra. With 680/770 2GB SLI, there is enough power but not enough VRAM.

Also, for 780/780Ti users, the problem appears again at 1440P as 3GB of VRAM is breached.

On the positive side, I have a feeling GM204 will come with 4GB/8GB of VRAM and GM210 with 6GB/12. On the AMD side, they'll probably offer 4/8GB R9 390X.

But we're not talking sli with GK104. Honestly I thought most everybody that wanted to sli grabbed the 4gb GK104.

Regarding the GTX 780ti it is one the most Vram starved cards I've ever seen. With it having roughly the performance of 2x gk104 and yet just 3gb. At least Gk104 is reaching the end of its performance life for high end gaming. on the other hand, the ti still has a lot of muscle but was crippled right out of the gate with the low Vram.

 

[Silverforce11]

Can confirm [H]ard's results. Game is a stutterfest with Ultra textures. You cannot even run High textures with MSAA, it still stutters. High textures+SMAA is the best you can manage at resolutions higher than 1080p with a 3GB card.

I wouldn't want to play this one on a 2GB card.

When the console specs were out we were discussing that future console ports would be GTA like, in that it will cripple GPUs with low vram, and here it is, the first big AAA console port and its exactly what happened.

Devs will use the hardware fully in a AAA title when the platform is as stable as consoles are per hardware specs.

It's quite sad to see two top tier cards struggle at just 1440/1600p, for something as cheap as vram quantity.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

They haven't even stopped making these games based off the last gen consoles. Imagine once the ps3 and 360 aren't in the picture anymore. Fortunately we will likely have 20nm or better GPUs once development shifts to ps4 and xbone as the baseline.

 

[Carfax83]

Can confirm [H]ard's results. Game is a stutterfest with Ultra textures. You cannot even run High textures with MSAA, it still stutters. High textures+SMAA is the best you can manage at resolutions higher than 1080p with a 3GB card.

I wouldn't want to play this one on a 2GB card.

You can try disabling your page file. Some people have tried it and they said it helped immensely with stuttering when running ultra textures.

If you don't want to disable the page file completely, you can use the -disablepagefilecheck tweak.

Right click on your shortcut and in the target section, add the -disablepagefilecheck so it looks like this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Ubisoft\Ubisoft Game Launcher\games\Watch_Dogs\bin\watch_dogs.exe" -disablepagefilecheck

Supposedly it stops the game from using the page file. I wouldn't use this tweak unless you have at least 8GB of memory.