Article - Guide - Review
Watch Dogs VGA graphics performance benchmark
For today's article we will benchmark Watch Dogs on the PC. The new game is a hit among PC gamers yet is bound to start a discussion or two, as the performance and system requirements topic of a debate alright. We will have a look at DX11 performance. The release of Watch Dogs on the PC is a little odd, it is a heavy duty AAA title yet offers graphics quality that is 'okay'. Meanwhile the game at the very least prefers a quad core processor, more than 4GB of system memory (6 GB is the norm). And you are going to need a beefy graphics card if you want to enable all eye candy alright. While playing around with a GeForce GTX 780 Ti and Radeon R9 290X I learned quickly that both these cards can not offer what the game really needs when it comes to raw performance if you flick on Ultra quality settings - Ultra Texture quality and high or exotic Anti aliasing levels. The problem mainly is related to graphics memory, as the game can easily pass 3 GB.
The game itself is sheer fun, yet comes with stutters and hick-ups if you do not have your settings right. The gameplay and experience however are top notch. You have to hack yourself into mobile phone's, CCTV camera's, computers and electronics to advance in this game. And sure, Watch Dogs certainly does remind us of GTA. The game engine has been PC optimized and especially with all tricks and bells enabled, it does look good if your graphics card en PC in general can manage it of course. However, no matter how we benchmark this title, the results remain a little unreliable with weird offsets here and there. As driving in car for example passing a crossing can slow down your framerate to a crawl, simple things like switching in-game to other quality settings sometimes even do not kick in.
During our test runs we found that one test run will result on 50 FPS, the second 40 FPS ... This means that the results shown today in this article are preliminary and indicative, not a precise measurement by any standard. And that's something we do not like. It in fact made me hesitate whether or not to post this article whatsoever.
As such today we'll show you a handful of graphics cards tested on three resolutions, Full HD (1920x1080), WQHD (2560x1440) and Ultra HD (3820x2160). our focus will be image quality settings and graphics memory, as the latter one is very important for Watch Dogs.
