The first Watch Dogs game was a mess on PC. The sequel, thankfully, is not.
I took the game for a spin last night on my almost-two-year-old PC and found that, after only one adjustment (turning V-sync on, as it was off by default and chopping up everything), the game’s default GeForce Experience optimised settings — normally not something I like to dabble with — did a real good job!
Here’s a video of me trying to put the game through its paces by driving like a maniac and panning the camera around a lot while I crash into traffic because I wasn’t looking where I was going.
For reference, my specs are a i5 4690 3.5ghz, GTX 980 and 16GB of RAM running Windows 10.
And here are the settings I’ve been playing on:
Now for the caveats: Is this game going to run perfectly for everyone? No. It’s a PC game. Don’t be ridiculous. There will always be those who through bad luck or bad purchasing are stuck with a hardware combination that will cause them problems. For example, me and Kirk are playing without a hitch, while Nathan is having some problems. But forums and discussions aren’t anywhere near as flooded with despair as they were with the original.
Is it as optimised as, say, The Witcher 3? No, it’s not. Even when you think you’ve got your settings settled and running smoothly you’ll probably hit points where the action drops under 60fps.
But are your chances good that you will be able to boot this game up and play it without any dramatic or game-ending issues, all the while enjoying something that looks pretty damn nice? The answer is a lot more likely to be “yes” than it was with, say, Watch Dogs 1, or Assassin’s Creed Unity. This game is fine, as you’ll find from benchmark reviews on sites like Guru3D and Techpowerup.
If you have the game and want to play around with your settings, there’s a useful Nvidia guide here, while GAF’s performance thread is also probably worth a bookmark.
Comments
7 responses to “Watch Dogs 2 Runs Just Fine On PC”
For a 2 year old pc it is pretty decently specced. Would be interesting to see how it runs on lower spec machines. Still it is refreshing to see a pc port that isn’t a dogs breakfast.
Check out the Guru3D and Tech Power Up links in the article – they actually go all the way down to a GTX950 or RX460.
(looks like my 1070 should be fine, which is good :p)
I would hope it runs fine because with Temporal Filtering on you are running the game at half your native resolution then it’s being unscaled.
Thanks for the tip, I didn’t know that, I haven’t checked but that’s probably why I’m not that impressed by the graphics of this game. I love the gameplay however, freeroam is awesome.
I will clarify that Temporal Filtering does more than just upscale the picture, it also applies 2x MSAA to fix some of the problems running in a lower resolution. However you will then see some artifacts around the edges of fine objects like grass and leaves and also some bluring in motion (which they try and hide with an added motion blur for “effect”).
Thanks, I actually went to look after I commented and it wasn’t on, I actually didn’t realize initially that you could keep scrolling down for more options so the real issue I was having was no Anti-Aliasing at all. Another reason it looked bad was I had Motion Blur turned on. I hate that, you can’t see shit if you’re trying to scan the area quickly.
But I tried Temporal Filtering just for fun and yeah you’re right it looks like crap around the edges, and in the information box that comes up when you’re about to change Temporal Filtering, it says that it basically halves the amount of processing needed because it renders the same frame twice, which made the frame rate look crap and did in-fact add an extra motion blur.
Thanks!
Devils canyon ftw! wikid CPU’s!
Im really glad to hear this news actually since I have a similar build