- Date:
- Tuesday , May 27, 2014
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Share:

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.
Graphics Settings
Display
Let's start with the first graphics menu you will come across, the "Display" menu option. Inside this window are some notable settings you do not want to pass over or miss. Naturally, you can change the resolution here, and the aspect ratio, window mode, and VSYNC. There are two specific options that we need to focus on.
Textures - There is a Textures setting in this game that has three settings, and these will directly impact your performance and smoothness in the game. The lowest setting is "Medium" and can be used on midrange or value-end video cards. The second setting "High" requires that you have 2GB of VRAM on your video card. Third, there is an "Ultra" setting that requires you to have 3GB of VRAM on your video card. This is very unique and a high requirement for the best textures in the game.
Naturally everyone will want the best textures, but you can't have these unless you have at least 3GB of VRAM. This is bad news for video cards like the GeForce GTX 770 and lower video cards, which only have 2GB. This is good news for AMD as AMD has had 3GB of VRAM on video cards since the Radeon HD 7950 and 7970 days. Oddly enough, as much as NVIDIA put into this game, something as simple as VRAM size may bite NVIDIA in the ass.
These texture requirements may also be the case that those midrange GPU options like the PNY 4GB GTX 770 we are evaluating now actually prove itself for the first time in this game. The extra money for more VRAM capacity could have a big impact on improving the gameplay experience in this game.
Anti-Aliasing - This game supports a wide range of AA settings, which we like to see in PC games. The screenshots above are showing what is available on an NVIDIA GeForce GPU. Everything you see there is also available on AMD GPUs except for TXAA options.
You can chose to run without AA of course. The second setting is a performance free FXAA setting that uses shaders to perform a post processing scene AA effect. The third option is also performance free and typically looks better than FXAA as it does not cause the blurring effect FXAA can create. The fourth method is called Temporal SMAA. We don't know much about the use of temporal SMAA in this game, we think it might deal with adding a super sample element to SMAA, but we have to test further and look deep at image quality to find out.
Traditional MSAA, 2X, 4X and 8X MSAA are supported. MSAA 8X requires at least 2GB of VRAM, but if you are going to run "Ultra" textures and high resolution we'd recommend double that. Finally, NVIDIA GPUs can also run TXAA 2X and TXAA 4X.
Graphics Quality
The "Graphics Quality" menu will lead you to more advanced options which you also do not want to miss. You can set an overall quality value of "Low", "Medium", "High" and "Ultra." In the above screenshots you see what the options below that are set to at each quality setting. Note that even at "Ultra" this is still not the highest settings possible in the game.
Ambient Occlusion - At the "Ultra" setting this game sets the mode of "MHBAO" which is standard HBAO, not the HBAO+ option described on the front page. That means even at "Ultra" you can push HBAO up even higher for a "Custom" setting that exceeds the "Ultra" settings.
The two other options above MHBAO are HBAO+ Low and HBAO+ High. This is a way to provide HBAO+ in a Low and High quality fashion, if for example HBAO+ High is too graphically intense, perhaps HBAO+ Low will work. You'll still be getting HBAO+ at Low, but it might be faster. Naturally, HBAO+ High is the highest form of Ambient Occlusion supported in the game and that's what you want for the best image quality.
Test Setup and Drivers
This is a preview and we have not had time to play through the game. Our run-through is from the first mission in the stadium all the way to the end of driving to your base.
Our test system is shown here.
For this game both NVIDIA and AMD provided new drivers to test with. We recommend upgrading to these drivers for this game.
AMD - Catalyst 14.6 Beta. (This driver should drop today.)
NVIDIA - ForceWare 337.88 WHQL drivers.


















