**Customizing Graphics Settings for Better Performance**

If you're tired of dealing with the performance issues that come with playing games like Watch Dogs, where rain can render frames at a slower rate and cause system lag, there are several settings you can tweak to improve your gaming experience. One of the first things you can do is adjust the rendering of splashes in the game. You can set this to zero if you're not interested in seeing the effect of rain on surfaces, or set it to one if you want to see the splash effects without affecting performance. Additionally, you can disable table splashes when jumping into bodies of water, which will also improve performance and reduce lag.

Another important setting is the LOD (Level of Detail) settings under the "Custom Quality" block. These settings allow you to fine-tune the level of detail in the game, from the texture resolution to the complexity of the physics engine. By adjusting these settings, you can balance the level of detail with performance and create a more immersive gaming experience.

**Physic Config**

The "Physic Config" setting is another important tweak that can help improve performance on lower-end hardware. This setting adjusts soft body physics, cloth, water, and elements affected by wind, allowing you to fine-tune the realism of these effects without sacrificing too much performance. For example, if you disable this setting, you may notice that NPCs' overcoats don't flow in the wind as they move around the game world. However, this can also lead to significant gains in performance, making it a useful tweak for those with lower-end hardware.

**Max Pre-rendered Frames**

The "Max Pre-rendered Frames" setting determines how many frames are pre-rendered on the GPU at any given time. This can help reduce stuttering and frame drops when dealing with VSync, especially in games that are not optimized well. By default, this value is set to 3, but you can adjust it up or down depending on your hardware's capabilities and your personal preferences.

It's worth noting that setting this value too high can actually have a negative impact on performance, so it's generally recommended to keep it at its default value or lower. Additionally, the "Max Driver Buffered Frames" setting is part of the same family and can be adjusted separately. If you're looking for a smoother VSync experience without sacrificing performance, you may want to consider adjusting this setting.

**Game Profile Settings**

The game profile settings are where you can control many of the game's behaviors and features. These include mouse sensitivity and acceleration, which can be tweaked to suit your playing style. However, since there is already an article on how to do this, we'll skip over those elements for now. Other tweaks available in this section include disabling use of the compass mini-map, subtitles, and Waypoint notifications. You can also adjust the mouse reticle's visibility by setting it to zero.

Furthermore, you can control the use of PDA notifications and disable them if you're not interested in seeing these pop-ups when receiving new missions or other updates. Finally, there is a toggle for disabling the mini-map, which can be useful for screenshots and other gameplay-related activities.

**Network Settings**

The network settings are another important tweak that can help improve performance on lower-end hardware. These settings allow you to configure the app's Network profile, including which ports need to be forwarded on your router. By setting these up correctly, you can ensure that your game is communicating with your server properly without sacrificing too much performance.

Additionally, there is a toggle for disabling voice chat, which can be useful if you're playing with friends who don't communicate effectively or if you just want to focus on the gameplay itself. However, keep in mind that this setting can also be changed within the game itself, so it's up to you to decide whether or not to enable or disable voice chat.

**Conclusion**

By tweaking these settings and adjusting your graphics quality to suit your hardware capabilities, you can create a more immersive gaming experience without sacrificing too much performance. Whether you're looking to improve your gameplay on lower-end hardware or simply want to enjoy the game with high-quality visuals without breaking the bank, these tweaks can help you achieve your goals.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus tonight and we are back with another watchdogs tweaking video in the previous video I showed you how to disable the two worst things ever in the world in history to happen the PC gaming mouse acceleration and mouse smoothing in this video we're looking at some graphics tweaking and performance optimization and we'll also be showing how to disable some of the HUD and UI elements that way you can learn how to take screenshots without those HUD elements obstructing your view of the Chicago slums or the high or the downtown area so first let's go and look at the custom LOD settings level of detail is a setting that you can define in the game's options but you can't define the lower level quality so things like environment quality geometry quality these things cannot be tweaked individually through the UI you must do them here do a ctrl F and find environment quality one word and that will bring us here to the custom quality settings you can see I've currently got it set to medium environment quality handles the view distance of things like NPCs and game objects without changing the other LOD subsets so if you want to have a very far view distance of buildings and structures you would set geometry quality to high or very high and if you want to keep your view distance of NPCs low you would set environment quality to medium or low and this will also impact performance but it's potentially very useful for screenshots it's a very powerful combination to change geometry and environment quality in that regard post effects quality is just how the visual effects look in-game you can change this through the same low medium high very high ultra settings as the others texture quality you can set to either PC or console that impacts performance slightly by dropping the texture quality and resolution and overall sharpness of the textures when you change the console do a ctrl F now for geometry quality this is the one that goes hand-in-hand with environment quality so geometry quality over here handles the view distance of structures of objects and generally buildings if you want to have a very far view distance of structures and and the objects and things like that you could set this to high and and then keep your environment settings at a lower value of performance is an issue terrain quality is of a similar tune it is the view distance that you will have for terrain elements so you'll still be able to see terrain a little bit far out but this gives this this impact how much detail that terrain has so you can once again change this to one of those options that you'll find in the game this is derived from the level of detail settings and is a subset of those vegetation quality is how the plant life and trees and stuff like that looks if you don't care about having high quality plant life and you'd rather have the performance gain on a low on system set this to low or medium and and then we can move over so a lot of this stuff is handled through the settings like shadow quality shading quality those are pretty obvious Road quality you can set the PC or console have you set it to console your roads will and sidewalks and other things on the ground floors will have slightly lower quality they look a little bit flatter in terms of the texture but you'll gain some performance there in theory I haven't really tested that too thoroughly but that's the theory particles quality is the quality of particle effects like let me let me find that again there we go particles quality so this impacts things like smoke some explosions whenever you blow panels up on the wall this will impact that set this to low medium if you are having performance issues when encountering those elements or high if you rather have it a you know better tuned for a high-end PC moving on from this we have things like rendering splashes and rain if you don't want to render rain for screenshot or other purposes or just because you're sick of the rain you can set this to zero if you want to render ray and set it to 1 and then splashes if you need a performance increase when it is raining say for example watch dogs rain makes your system lag a little bit or drop in frame rate set this to zero that will disable splashes when rain hits surfaces it will also just table splashes when you jump into bodies of water again improving performance so that's some of the LOD settings under the custom quality block now we can move on to things like let's move on to physic config so there's another file called physic config under engine profile you can set this to high-low whatever I think that the fault value might be high physic config is a subset of LOD this one adjusts soft body physics of cloth water and elements affected by wind a real-world example this would be to drive around on a motorcycle in watchdog's and then look at aaden's overcoat you'll notice that his overcoat kind of flows in the wind as you're driving on that motorcycle if you disable this or set it to low you will lose that immersion element but you'll have some pretty good gains and performance so once again that tweak will help optimize for lower end video cards like the seventy seven seventy two of these 250 X 750 Ti stuff like that and moving on from this one let's go look at max pre-rendered frames I think it's all one word it is all one word so max pre-rendered frames you can set by default I think it is a three this is how many frames are being pre-rendered on the GPU so each one of these frames is filling the GPU buffer your memory on the video card if you've got a lot of RAM on your video card if you have a large frame buffer you can set this to a higher value and it will mitigate some of the stuttering or frame drops when dealing with vsync when you have vsync on that will make your overall experience smoother but with a lower end video card even at 290 X in some cases and testing because the game is horribly optimized but with the lower end video card for sure having this value above 1 is going to be a huge negative impact to your performance to your overall fps set this to 1 if you've got more conservative Hardware in terms of performance max driver buffered frames is a part of the same family and I've got this at zero for performance reasons you can increase this if you've got a high-end set up and want to be wanting to put out and more smooth vsync experience moving on from these we've already done all of the graphics stuff for the most part so now we can move on to game profile settings and just type in game profile and control F so here's where we can control mouse sensitivity and acceleration I already have a video on how to do that so we will skip over those elements and then you can also tweak things like gamepad vibration if you've got a rumble pack in your game pad you can enable or disable here if you're trying to take screenshots disable use compass mini-map disable things like use subtitles you can disable the reticle on the screen by setting this to zero it's always set to zero to disable it it's a 1 or 0 as in yes or no it's binary use Waypoint you can set that to zero to disable the little yellow Waypoint on the screen for screenshot purposes PDA notifications are the actual pop-ups when you get a new mission or have another notification set that's a zero to disable it or one to enable it mini-map is here set that to zero for screenshots and then a couple of other UI elements are in here as well so just toggle those based on if you want them on your screen or not basically finally network settings you can use to control app for Network profile you can use these to determine which ports need to be forwarded on a router that requires manual forwarding for game ports so the ones you'll want are 9000 through nine thousand five and it details exactly what each one is used for here and if you want to disable voice chat because people suck then you can do that here as well by setting it to zero and I believe that can be changed in game as well so that's the gamer profile that XML file save this set it to read-only when you're done and the watchdog's will not overwrite it and hopefully tweaking some of those graphic settings will improve performance on low-end hardware while retaining high quality settings for things that are important to you like via distance of NPCs or buildings so please check the link in the description below for a full detailed guide on all this if you need any help leave a comment on that article if you need help and I will see you all next time peacehey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus tonight and we are back with another watchdogs tweaking video in the previous video I showed you how to disable the two worst things ever in the world in history to happen the PC gaming mouse acceleration and mouse smoothing in this video we're looking at some graphics tweaking and performance optimization and we'll also be showing how to disable some of the HUD and UI elements that way you can learn how to take screenshots without those HUD elements obstructing your view of the Chicago slums or the high or the downtown area so first let's go and look at the custom LOD settings level of detail is a setting that you can define in the game's options but you can't define the lower level quality so things like environment quality geometry quality these things cannot be tweaked individually through the UI you must do them here do a ctrl F and find environment quality one word and that will bring us here to the custom quality settings you can see I've currently got it set to medium environment quality handles the view distance of things like NPCs and game objects without changing the other LOD subsets so if you want to have a very far view distance of buildings and structures you would set geometry quality to high or very high and if you want to keep your view distance of NPCs low you would set environment quality to medium or low and this will also impact performance but it's potentially very useful for screenshots it's a very powerful combination to change geometry and environment quality in that regard post effects quality is just how the visual effects look in-game you can change this through the same low medium high very high ultra settings as the others texture quality you can set to either PC or console that impacts performance slightly by dropping the texture quality and resolution and overall sharpness of the textures when you change the console do a ctrl F now for geometry quality this is the one that goes hand-in-hand with environment quality so geometry quality over here handles the view distance of structures of objects and generally buildings if you want to have a very far view distance of structures and and the objects and things like that you could set this to high and and then keep your environment settings at a lower value of performance is an issue terrain quality is of a similar tune it is the view distance that you will have for terrain elements so you'll still be able to see terrain a little bit far out but this gives this this impact how much detail that terrain has so you can once again change this to one of those options that you'll find in the game this is derived from the level of detail settings and is a subset of those vegetation quality is how the plant life and trees and stuff like that looks if you don't care about having high quality plant life and you'd rather have the performance gain on a low on system set this to low or medium and and then we can move over so a lot of this stuff is handled through the settings like shadow quality shading quality those are pretty obvious Road quality you can set the PC or console have you set it to console your roads will and sidewalks and other things on the ground floors will have slightly lower quality they look a little bit flatter in terms of the texture but you'll gain some performance there in theory I haven't really tested that too thoroughly but that's the theory particles quality is the quality of particle effects like let me let me find that again there we go particles quality so this impacts things like smoke some explosions whenever you blow panels up on the wall this will impact that set this to low medium if you are having performance issues when encountering those elements or high if you rather have it a you know better tuned for a high-end PC moving on from this we have things like rendering splashes and rain if you don't want to render rain for screenshot or other purposes or just because you're sick of the rain you can set this to zero if you want to render ray and set it to 1 and then splashes if you need a performance increase when it is raining say for example watch dogs rain makes your system lag a little bit or drop in frame rate set this to zero that will disable splashes when rain hits surfaces it will also just table splashes when you jump into bodies of water again improving performance so that's some of the LOD settings under the custom quality block now we can move on to things like let's move on to physic config so there's another file called physic config under engine profile you can set this to high-low whatever I think that the fault value might be high physic config is a subset of LOD this one adjusts soft body physics of cloth water and elements affected by wind a real-world example this would be to drive around on a motorcycle in watchdog's and then look at aaden's overcoat you'll notice that his overcoat kind of flows in the wind as you're driving on that motorcycle if you disable this or set it to low you will lose that immersion element but you'll have some pretty good gains and performance so once again that tweak will help optimize for lower end video cards like the seventy seven seventy two of these 250 X 750 Ti stuff like that and moving on from this one let's go look at max pre-rendered frames I think it's all one word it is all one word so max pre-rendered frames you can set by default I think it is a three this is how many frames are being pre-rendered on the GPU so each one of these frames is filling the GPU buffer your memory on the video card if you've got a lot of RAM on your video card if you have a large frame buffer you can set this to a higher value and it will mitigate some of the stuttering or frame drops when dealing with vsync when you have vsync on that will make your overall experience smoother but with a lower end video card even at 290 X in some cases and testing because the game is horribly optimized but with the lower end video card for sure having this value above 1 is going to be a huge negative impact to your performance to your overall fps set this to 1 if you've got more conservative Hardware in terms of performance max driver buffered frames is a part of the same family and I've got this at zero for performance reasons you can increase this if you've got a high-end set up and want to be wanting to put out and more smooth vsync experience moving on from these we've already done all of the graphics stuff for the most part so now we can move on to game profile settings and just type in game profile and control F so here's where we can control mouse sensitivity and acceleration I already have a video on how to do that so we will skip over those elements and then you can also tweak things like gamepad vibration if you've got a rumble pack in your game pad you can enable or disable here if you're trying to take screenshots disable use compass mini-map disable things like use subtitles you can disable the reticle on the screen by setting this to zero it's always set to zero to disable it it's a 1 or 0 as in yes or no it's binary use Waypoint you can set that to zero to disable the little yellow Waypoint on the screen for screenshot purposes PDA notifications are the actual pop-ups when you get a new mission or have another notification set that's a zero to disable it or one to enable it mini-map is here set that to zero for screenshots and then a couple of other UI elements are in here as well so just toggle those based on if you want them on your screen or not basically finally network settings you can use to control app for Network profile you can use these to determine which ports need to be forwarded on a router that requires manual forwarding for game ports so the ones you'll want are 9000 through nine thousand five and it details exactly what each one is used for here and if you want to disable voice chat because people suck then you can do that here as well by setting it to zero and I believe that can be changed in game as well so that's the gamer profile that XML file save this set it to read-only when you're done and the watchdog's will not overwrite it and hopefully tweaking some of those graphic settings will improve performance on low-end hardware while retaining high quality settings for things that are important to you like via distance of NPCs or buildings so please check the link in the description below for a full detailed guide on all this if you need any help leave a comment on that article if you need help and I will see you all next time peace\n"