Today's Hard|Forum Post
Today's Hard|Forum Post
Date:
Tuesday , May 27, 2014
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Watch Dogs AMD & NVIDIA GPU Performance Preview

Watch Dogs is out on the PC, sporting a new game engine named "Disrupt." This next generation gaming title is poised to put the kick back in PC gaming technology that has been missing so far this year. We will evaluate performance in this preview evaluation and see if it stands up to high end GPU hardware.

Introduction

One of the game's we have been waiting for a while is finally here, Watch Dogs. This anticipated game is an open world action-adventure game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft.

This game has been dubbed a "next gen" game as it is using a game engine created in 2013 called Disrupt. This new engine was specifically created for this game mostly from scratch with some components from the AnvilNext and Dunia engines which power games such as Assassin's Creed and Far Cry 3. No other game uses this new Disrupt gaming engine, making it new and unique. The game also features Havok powered physics.

Evaluation Direction

Before we go further we need to explain the goals and direction of this preview evaluation. This is a Preview of performance quality in Watch Dogs. This preview this lacks a lot of in-depth evaluation that a full blown evaluation on performance and image quality article would go into. The testing you see here today in this preview is a culmination of spending a single day with the game, finding a run-through, giving you some performance comparisons to see what to expect and looking at image quality features. As we have completed this preview, we have a better idea of what we will be focusing on and testing in our full blown evaluation to come. Later today we will add a image quality comparison article with screenshots.

Second, please keep in mind that this preview evaluation will focus on the technology of the game in terms of graphics performance and features. We do not evaluate the "fun factor" of this game, or the storyline. We are strictly interested in how video cards accelerate this game and what these deliver to bring forth the graphics gameplay experience. When we refer to this game being "good" or "bad" and applying modifiers of opinion we are stating it in regards to the technology of the game, not the storyline or how fun the game is.

NVIDIA Added Features

NVIDIA has had a heavy hand in the development and implementation of graphics features in this game. NVIDIA is also offering this game as a bundle with GeForce video cards. NVIDIA has provided us a reviewers guide with some information about certain technologies integrated into the game we will briefly go over.

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The developers for Watch Dogs have used NVIDIA's GameWorks development platform in the development process of this game. This is simply a collection of tools and technologies developers can utilize from NVIDIA if the devs wish to integrate certain features into games. NVIDIA provides sample libraries and SDKs that developers can chose to integrate. This is a fancy name for a collection of all that is possible for developers to utilize NVIDIA created technologies like HBAO+, TXAA, and lots more.

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One of the most notable graphics features is the inclusion of NVIDIA HBAO+ ambient occlusion technology. This is not the first game to use HBAO+. We have seen this in Splinter Cell: Blacklist. Here is a list of games that use HBAO+.

Watch Dogs supports HBAO+Low and HBAO+High modes, as well as regular HBAO modes. AMD hardware can run HBAO+ just fine in this game, it is a technology that does not, thankfully, run exclusive on NVIDIA hardware.

Watch Dogs also supports NVIDIA's TXAA 2X and TXAA 4X modes. In the past we've seen horrible use of TXAA where it creates massive blurring [here] and [here]. We will have to see how it is implemented in this game.

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We found this recommended test configuration interesting to post here and talk about. For 4K resolutions NVIDIA is recommending nothing less than dual GeForce TITAN Black SLI for running at 4K in this game. What's more NVIDIA recommends only the "High" quality setting for this game, when this game does have a higher "Ultra" quality. NVIDIA also recommends the texture setting of "High" not "Ultra" at 4K even with two GTX TITAN Black SLI video cards. This shows how demanding this game must be if even NVIDIA is recommending these loosened graphics settings with its most powerful GPUs in SLI at 4K.