**Optimization Issues with Watch Dogs**

It's strange that optimization issues don't normally happen, but they did occur in Titanfall. This was because the text resolution didn't have a significant impact on visuals until low settings were reached. Another issue we faced with Watch Dogs is optimization as you decrease the settings.

To test this, I ran tests on Ultra, Medium, and High settings, not just Ultra as previously seen. The purpose of running these tests on lower-end video cards was to see how they performed in those scenarios, as it's not fair to only run them on one setting. When testing at Medium, a 700+ dollar video card with a 3570K overclocked to 4.4GHz and 16GB of fast RAM produced 100 FPS using Temporal SMAA. This is within the same realm as playing on Ultra with Temporal SMAA, which produces about 90 FPS.

This tells us that almost all the performance gain is due to Anti-Aliasing (AA), and it's horribly unoptimized in Watch Dogs. The game should not even be using it, according to some users. I was speaking with someone from the Build the PC Reddit and other reddits, who has a 7,7870 AMD GPU that experiences severe stuttering issues with certain types of anti-aliasing. They were able to reproduce this issue after much effort on their 270x.

When moving down to lower-end GPUs, we start hitting the 50 FPS range or lower, which is when you start getting into unplayable territory at Medium settings and need to drop too low. This is where our Benchmark comes in. I'll throw up the High one here again just so you can kind of read through this as I'm talking.

**Benchmark Results**

The results are as follows:

* 750 Ti with Medium settings and Temporal SMAA produces nearly 60 FPS, averaging around 54 FPS.

* The 770 performs about 85 FPS on average at Medium settings.

* When moving down to lower-end GPUs, we start hitting the 50 FPS range or lower.

**Conclusion**

If you're set on playing Watch Dogs and want to build a system around it or are spec'ing your system around it, what you should know is that the 750 Ti has the most impressive performance. Everything else scales above this point, with diminishing returns, and below this point, it's completely playable.

Beyond the 750 Ti, you don't need to worry about CPUs almost at all, as when looking between the 4770K and the 357K, which is a $100 difference and a one-generation difference, we see half an FPS improvement. This is within margin of error that shouldn't be considered, so for all intents and purposes, the two CPUs are identical.

**Final Thoughts**

Please check the link in the description below for the full article and my new guide, which is also a video guide on how to tweak a configuration file to improve Watch Dog's performance. This should hopefully help mitigate some of the FPS issues we're talking about here.

If you have any questions whatsoever, leave them on the article linked below or on this video. I will do my best to answer them if I don't not answer hit me again on the comments in the article and I will see you all next time peace

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone this is Steve from Gamers nexus.net and today we're going to talk about the Watchdogs PC benchmarks I ran a couple of days ago I ran them on Tuesday when the game came out so we're just kind of recapping this here for the YouTube audience for those who are not in the loop I ran a series of video card benchmarks and one CPU Benchmark with watch doogs the new PC game that is reportedly pretty poorly optimized so I explored that statement here in this uh in this article and now we're recapping in the video so here's here's the setup I tested Watch Dogs on these video cards a GTX 750 Ti and AMD 250X those are the two lowest end ones I tested on a 7850 1 GB card and uh r9270x 2 GB card a GTX 772 GB card and R9 290x 4 GB Monster card and a 780 Ti 3 GB Monster card finally I added a uh a 4770k to the mix for determining if there is in fact a CPU throttle or bottleneck and other than that one CPU I used a 3570k from The Ivy Bridge lineup for all tests so the only test where a 4770k was featured was with a 780 Ti and I did test this internally with other devices but did not publish the results because they were all frankly the same they were all very uninteresting uh so here's here's what we know first of all watch doogs have I been saying Titanfall I feel like I've been saying Titanfall Watch Dogs is a very intensive game in terms of visuals but it doesn't necessarily look in a way that is corresponding to the uh the frame rate so there's a big frame rate hit it just it's not it's not this generation's crisis that's all there is to it it looks good it doesn't look GPU melting good but there are optimization issues and it's on the software side MD and Nvidia have both put out drivers that help a lot in this regard with AMD my testing determined up to 10.5% better with 14.6 Catalyst over 14.4 they claim 25% I believe that's only with the 290x and Crossfire I saw 10.5% with Nvidia there's a pretty big gain also and in some cases the drivers are required to even make the game playable without blue screen of death so even with these drivers and Graphics optimizations by the GPU manufacturers we still have serious FPS issues and let me show you let me show you what I mean the 780 Ti is a $720 video card it is a monster when I couple this with the 4770k which is a 300 to $330 CPU and I use this on a an internal z97 platform just for the record it was only at uh 53 FPS average when using ultra settings and Max settings when I benchmarked with the PC so keep keep in mind this is a a setup that would cost most users ,500 to $2,000 to get working and it's running 53 FPS with Max settings that should never happen with a game that looks like Watchdogs again looks good not amazing so why is that happening right that's the question why is this running so poorly well if we look at my GPU optimization guide or or rather my Watchdog optimization guide since the gpus are pretty good on their own we'll see that things like anti-aliasing have horrible effect on the game and don't necessarily produce a lot of visual Fidelity in terms of uh quality of visuals so disabling msaa 4X and or or dropping it down to temporal smaa which is sort of a a cheat anti-aliasing that I wrote about previously doing those things dropping to temporal smaa will nearly double the frame rate it's like it goes from 53 FPS average to 90 with a 780 Ti so that's the first thing you need to know so disabling or minimizing in AA will improve your frame rate but still ultra high medium texture resolutions doesn't matter what you use or how much RAM your video card has I had almost the same performance when I kept all other settings identical except for texture resolution and that's kind of strange it doesn't normally happen it happened a little bit in Titanfall but that was because the text resolution didn't actually impact visuals all that much not until you got to low so another issue we have with Watch Dogs is uh optimization as you decrease the settings I didn't only run these tests on Ultra as you've seen thus far I also ran them on medium and on high and the purpose of that was just to see how the lower-end video cards performed in those scenarios since it's not quite Fair otherwise so so looking at medium the 780 Ti a 700 plus doll video card with the 3570k overclock to 4.4 GHz and 16 gabt of very fast Ram we got 100 FPS and that was testing with temporal smaa that's not with msaa forx or whatever it's temporal smaa which is the lower setting that has produced higher FPS results you'll notice that this is within the same realm when I said that playing on Ultra with temporal smaa with a 780 Ti produces about a 90 FPS so we're 10 FPS Faster by going to medium that tells us what it tells us that almost all the performance gain is an AA so something with anti-aliasing is horribly unoptimized in watch doog to the point where you should not even be using it and actually I was speaking with with Gadget from the build the PC Reddit and other reddits and he has a 7 7870 AMD GPU that has severe stuttering issues uh with certain types of anti-aliasing I was able to reproduce that finally after much effort on my 270x you'll also notice that the GTX 770 performs about 85 FPS average on medium and then let's just skip a few of these going down to the 7850 is and and uh 250xs of the world is where we start hitting the 50 and lower FPS range so that's when you start getting into unplayable territory on medium and need to drop too low um so that's our our Benchmark I'll throw up the the high one here again just so you can kind of read through that as I'm talking and the conclusion here first of all I want to make it very clear I am not yet commenting on whether Watch Dogs is a good game because I don't feel confident that I played it enough from a gameplay gameplay standpoint to make that statement but strictly from a hardware perspective if you are set on playing this game and you're going to build a system around it or you're specking your system around it or you're trying to make sure you can even run it before you buy it what you should know is that the 750 Ti hands down has the most impressive performance here everything else is sort of uh once you scale above that you're getting diminishing returns and once you go below that it's completely playable so with a 750 Ti uh with medium settings and temporal smaa I was able to produce nearly 60 FPS it was about 54 FPS on average with a 35 70k and uh and then other than that everything's pretty normalized and uninteresting so that would be the card to get it's 150 bucks that would be the card to get if you're building around this game because it plays it well it produces a very smooth frame rate frame rate excuse me I didn't have any frame drops like I did with some of the other cards even the 780 Ti had frame dropping issues it's kind of actually uh frankly outrageous but um that that is the card I would look at beyond that you don't need to worry about CPUs almost at all because when we look between the 4770k and the 357k which is a $100 difference and a one generation difference we see uh half an FPS Improvement which is within margin of error that's not even something that should be considered so for all intents and purposes the the two CPUs are identical the i7 and the I5 are identical in performance for Watch Dogs so that's sort of the need to know information please check the link in the description below for the full article I will also link uh my new guide it's also a video guide on the channel for how to tweak a configuration file to improve watch dog's performance and that should hopefully help mitigate some of the FPS issues we're talking about here I've I've sort of determined that a lot of those uh manual tweaks will improve impr your overall performance and hopefully eliminate some of the crashing issues that have run rampant in the game for some users with some specific subsets of Hardware please like comment and subscribe as always if you have any questions whatsoever leave them on the article linked below or on this video I will do my very best to answer them if I do not answer hit me again on the comments in the article and I will see you all next time peacehey everyone this is Steve from Gamers nexus.net and today we're going to talk about the Watchdogs PC benchmarks I ran a couple of days ago I ran them on Tuesday when the game came out so we're just kind of recapping this here for the YouTube audience for those who are not in the loop I ran a series of video card benchmarks and one CPU Benchmark with watch doogs the new PC game that is reportedly pretty poorly optimized so I explored that statement here in this uh in this article and now we're recapping in the video so here's here's the setup I tested Watch Dogs on these video cards a GTX 750 Ti and AMD 250X those are the two lowest end ones I tested on a 7850 1 GB card and uh r9270x 2 GB card a GTX 772 GB card and R9 290x 4 GB Monster card and a 780 Ti 3 GB Monster card finally I added a uh a 4770k to the mix for determining if there is in fact a CPU throttle or bottleneck and other than that one CPU I used a 3570k from The Ivy Bridge lineup for all tests so the only test where a 4770k was featured was with a 780 Ti and I did test this internally with other devices but did not publish the results because they were all frankly the same they were all very uninteresting uh so here's here's what we know first of all watch doogs have I been saying Titanfall I feel like I've been saying Titanfall Watch Dogs is a very intensive game in terms of visuals but it doesn't necessarily look in a way that is corresponding to the uh the frame rate so there's a big frame rate hit it just it's not it's not this generation's crisis that's all there is to it it looks good it doesn't look GPU melting good but there are optimization issues and it's on the software side MD and Nvidia have both put out drivers that help a lot in this regard with AMD my testing determined up to 10.5% better with 14.6 Catalyst over 14.4 they claim 25% I believe that's only with the 290x and Crossfire I saw 10.5% with Nvidia there's a pretty big gain also and in some cases the drivers are required to even make the game playable without blue screen of death so even with these drivers and Graphics optimizations by the GPU manufacturers we still have serious FPS issues and let me show you let me show you what I mean the 780 Ti is a $720 video card it is a monster when I couple this with the 4770k which is a 300 to $330 CPU and I use this on a an internal z97 platform just for the record it was only at uh 53 FPS average when using ultra settings and Max settings when I benchmarked with the PC so keep keep in mind this is a a setup that would cost most users ,500 to $2,000 to get working and it's running 53 FPS with Max settings that should never happen with a game that looks like Watchdogs again looks good not amazing so why is that happening right that's the question why is this running so poorly well if we look at my GPU optimization guide or or rather my Watchdog optimization guide since the gpus are pretty good on their own we'll see that things like anti-aliasing have horrible effect on the game and don't necessarily produce a lot of visual Fidelity in terms of uh quality of visuals so disabling msaa 4X and or or dropping it down to temporal smaa which is sort of a a cheat anti-aliasing that I wrote about previously doing those things dropping to temporal smaa will nearly double the frame rate it's like it goes from 53 FPS average to 90 with a 780 Ti so that's the first thing you need to know so disabling or minimizing in AA will improve your frame rate but still ultra high medium texture resolutions doesn't matter what you use or how much RAM your video card has I had almost the same performance when I kept all other settings identical except for texture resolution and that's kind of strange it doesn't normally happen it happened a little bit in Titanfall but that was because the text resolution didn't actually impact visuals all that much not until you got to low so another issue we have with Watch Dogs is uh optimization as you decrease the settings I didn't only run these tests on Ultra as you've seen thus far I also ran them on medium and on high and the purpose of that was just to see how the lower-end video cards performed in those scenarios since it's not quite Fair otherwise so so looking at medium the 780 Ti a 700 plus doll video card with the 3570k overclock to 4.4 GHz and 16 gabt of very fast Ram we got 100 FPS and that was testing with temporal smaa that's not with msaa forx or whatever it's temporal smaa which is the lower setting that has produced higher FPS results you'll notice that this is within the same realm when I said that playing on Ultra with temporal smaa with a 780 Ti produces about a 90 FPS so we're 10 FPS Faster by going to medium that tells us what it tells us that almost all the performance gain is an AA so something with anti-aliasing is horribly unoptimized in watch doog to the point where you should not even be using it and actually I was speaking with with Gadget from the build the PC Reddit and other reddits and he has a 7 7870 AMD GPU that has severe stuttering issues uh with certain types of anti-aliasing I was able to reproduce that finally after much effort on my 270x you'll also notice that the GTX 770 performs about 85 FPS average on medium and then let's just skip a few of these going down to the 7850 is and and uh 250xs of the world is where we start hitting the 50 and lower FPS range so that's when you start getting into unplayable territory on medium and need to drop too low um so that's our our Benchmark I'll throw up the the high one here again just so you can kind of read through that as I'm talking and the conclusion here first of all I want to make it very clear I am not yet commenting on whether Watch Dogs is a good game because I don't feel confident that I played it enough from a gameplay gameplay standpoint to make that statement but strictly from a hardware perspective if you are set on playing this game and you're going to build a system around it or you're specking your system around it or you're trying to make sure you can even run it before you buy it what you should know is that the 750 Ti hands down has the most impressive performance here everything else is sort of uh once you scale above that you're getting diminishing returns and once you go below that it's completely playable so with a 750 Ti uh with medium settings and temporal smaa I was able to produce nearly 60 FPS it was about 54 FPS on average with a 35 70k and uh and then other than that everything's pretty normalized and uninteresting so that would be the card to get it's 150 bucks that would be the card to get if you're building around this game because it plays it well it produces a very smooth frame rate frame rate excuse me I didn't have any frame drops like I did with some of the other cards even the 780 Ti had frame dropping issues it's kind of actually uh frankly outrageous but um that that is the card I would look at beyond that you don't need to worry about CPUs almost at all because when we look between the 4770k and the 357k which is a $100 difference and a one generation difference we see uh half an FPS Improvement which is within margin of error that's not even something that should be considered so for all intents and purposes the the two CPUs are identical the i7 and the I5 are identical in performance for Watch Dogs so that's sort of the need to know information please check the link in the description below for the full article I will also link uh my new guide it's also a video guide on the channel for how to tweak a configuration file to improve watch dog's performance and that should hopefully help mitigate some of the FPS issues we're talking about here I've I've sort of determined that a lot of those uh manual tweaks will improve impr your overall performance and hopefully eliminate some of the crashing issues that have run rampant in the game for some users with some specific subsets of Hardware please like comment and subscribe as always if you have any questions whatsoever leave them on the article linked below or on this video I will do my very best to answer them if I do not answer hit me again on the comments in the article and I will see you all next time peace\n"