Watch Dogs Game Discussion Pt 3

The latest patch actually did eliminate the stuttering for me on high textures (with other settings being ultra). Unfortunately the frame dipping issue is still there and the frame-rate goes down to 24-25 at some points while driving. That's still some pretty sh#tty performance for you and embarrassing on Ubisoft's side, but at least it's not as unbearable as before now that the stuttering is gone.

Not to mention, ultra textures still turn the game into a slideshow.

The gains of the patch, if any, are absymal. Three full weeks and they come up with a patch that's ridiculously useless. I've been waiting for this patch to start the game, now that Ubisoft fired a blank with his only chance to revive the friggin' game on PC, I can finally start playing the game on PS4. PC version's not gonna get fixed, fellas. I've known this from the very start, it's a fool's errand. They absolutely knew how much of a bad state the PC version was in before releasing the game, I thought maybe they rushed it out and they needed some time for the fix so I've waited, but now I'm 100% sure that the problem with the PC version is not something that can be fixed with a simple patch, that's why they probably released the game as it is anyway.

My take's that they created the E3 2012/2013 demo stages on PC, it was not a full game, and they had nothing else than those parts of the maps they showed at that stage. With the reveal of next-gen gaming consoles, they left the PC development completely (they didn't really start on it anyway, it was just some small portion of the map) and started developing it on PS4/XBO, finished the levels completely and optimized the game code for consoles, downgrading the graphics in the meantime as next-gen consoles turned out to have lower specs than they expected (there was no mention of next-gen consoles yet when they showcased the E3 2012 demo anyway) and THEN ported it for the PC. As the game code is designed to make use of the unified memory of next-gen consoles, it worked diabolical on PC, but they didn't have enough time and/or didn't care about the PC version anyway so some genious at Ubisoft came out and said: "Hey, why bother ourselves, PCs with enough horsepower will be able to tolerate our poor job at porting the game!"

I would not be surprised ONE BIT if the actual story was exactly like that. Oh well, I'm done with this game on PC, starting the game on my PS4 tonight.

I'll say one last thing though: the middle finger Ubisoft gave to PC gamers will be remembered. EA is said to be the worst gaming company out there but I don't remember a single EA game giving me trouble on PC in terms of performance.

 

Ever since the first Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter for xbox 360 they've been doing the old bait and switch.

I've still got the Official Xbox 360 Mag (AU) somewhere where Ubi states and shows 'in-game' screenshots that you'll be able to see everything your team mates see in realtime gfx as they see it. Once released, it was changed to just a blue/green wireframe view of you teammates view. Even on the PC version its was the same. They nerfed the gfx to of course.

 

Add another who is back to being able to run the game reasonably smoothly after uninstalling the beta Nvidia drivers, Ultra + 1080p is back to somewhere in between 69/39 (when I look up at the FPS counter it's usually somewhere around one of those two!) personally I don't get too hung up on the FPS though, if it's smooth I enjoy it, if it's not I don't

 

Ooooouuut of curiosity.. can mouse smoothing be increased? If so, i find it can help with hiding a choppy or low fps game.

 

the patch + 340 driver enhenced the game for me @1440p everything ultra except texture, , but the frame rate still dip time to time

 

Ever considered that the actual problem might not be in Ubisoft's hand? Maybe a driver problem, maybe a problem on your system?

Since there ARE many people who can play with Ultra textures with very few hitches every now and then... Like me for example.

 

I did. Many times. I've searched high and low as to what could be the problem. I doubted my CPU before (which has never caused a single problem up to know, even while playing demanding games like Crysis 3, Metro 2033 or Battlefield 4) but then I read a CPU benchmark that says the difference between an i5 2500k and i7 4770 would be minimal (2-3 fps at best) in this game. I've updated the drivers, tried every trick that I know of: disabling vsync and forcing it using radeonpro, enabling triple buffering, using SMAA rather than MSAA, setting gpu buffered frames to 1, using -disablepagefilecheck command to improve the performance- nothing seemed to work.

Assuming you play the game on the config you specified in your profile, I'd deduce that the game would run better on my system as I have a better GPU and CPU than yours. But in practice, that's not the case. Maybe that's because I have an AMD card and there is a serious driver problem that needs to be adressed as well, but I remember an AMD agent saying it's difficult for them to further optimize the drivers as Watch Dogs is an Nvidia Gameworks title.

And I don't care about playing the game on PC anymore as I gave up already. Mine's just curiosity, I solely want to know what's going on with this game rather than trying to fix it or hoping that it would be fixed one way or another. Such a friggin' mystery why the game runs good on some configs and poor on others that are similar/better.

 

Yes, I'm playing on the machine I listed in my profile.

I agree that your CPU and GPU is more powerful. But for the smooth gameplay with highres textures the power of the CPU and GPU is not that important. The amount of VRAM and the overall transfer rate of data between the system RAM and the VRAM is much more important in that situation.

Since you also have 4 GB VRAM, I'd say that there's something preventing the system of making proper use of that.

Did you monitor the VRAM usage?

There could also be a problem on your system that interferes with the data transfer over the PCIe bus. Since even with 4 GB of VRAM, I'm pretty sure that the game HAS to upload new textures into the VRAM every now and then in an open world game like WD.

 

Actually I already did that as well. The game seems to be accessing all the VRAM my GPU has. I'd gladly share my results (values monitored through MSI Afterburner):


1080p/SMAA/Ultra Settings/Textures on High

Maximum VRAM Usage: 2.6 GB

Maximum RAM Usage: 3.7 GB

Minimum FPS: 27

* * * *

1080p/SMAA/Ultra Settings/Textures on Ultra

Maximum VRAM Usage: 3.3 GB

Maximum RAM Usage: 4 GB

Minimum FPS: 21


I really don't know what else to say after these numbers. The game is a VRAM beast, and uses only half of the DDR3 RAM I have in my system in the most extreme conditions. In my opinion, that's just another proof that the game was designed to work on consoles, and ported poorly to PCs.

 

Why would the game use more system RAM if it just doesn't need it? Remember: Since Win7 the driver allows to use the VRAM directly as virtual memory for the process, so it's no longer necessary to have a copy of every texture in the system RAM.

Since the game runs fine on my system, I still don't think that the game is generally flawed. There might be a very specific conflict on your system. That doesn't necessarily mean that there's something wrong with your system, but there are SO many factors which can cause a conflict in some way, you just cannot rule that out.

 

its fun to drive in the offroad with 3 guys in the back shooting out of the car ^^

 

It's surprising because it says you need to have 8 gigs of RAM in the recommended system specs so you kind of expect it to hit 6 GB or so when there's heavy streaming going on in the game. But in fact it barely hits 4 GB, the highest value I've seen so far when using ultra textures was 3900 something.

How much of a percentage would you need to consider the game "generally flawed"? I'd say you're in the lucky minority and the internet is flooded with poor performance reports coming from users like myself, including Ubisoft's official forums. I think that's more than enough to make it a "technically flawed" game.

 

Agreed.. Its performance is well documented and the furthest thing from isolated incidents.

 

What makes you think that I'm in the minority?

How many people with VRAM of 3 GB and more do you know which can't use ultra textures in WD?

BTW, if the game actually uses 3900 GB, I'd recommend to use 8 GB as the system memory requirement myself. 6GB might work well enough, if you're conservative with other processes, but 8GB sounds very reasonable to ask for.

As usual: How many people with NO problems are posting in forums?

I don't claim that the game plays without hitches on ultra textures. When driving fast, it does hitch every now and then, but it's still playable very well. While Plissken claims that it's totally unplayable for him on ultra textures.

 

I gave you guys my results above, if gradually going from 40 FPS down to 21 FPS while driving in an open-world game in which driving is a fundamental part of the gameplay doesn't make it "unplayable" I don't know what does. I speak by numbers here, so I will stand by my statement. The stuttering is so terrible that the game is unplayable on ultra textures for me. It's playable on high textures (better after the patch), but the performance is still worse than it should have been.

I think you're in the minority because negative comments on the game's performance way outweigh the positive ones. I didn't even think it was up to debate, you can take a look at any gaming website and you'll see tons comments about how bad it runs, even on configurations that are quite capable of running every high-end game without a sweat, and very little positive comments that say the game runs just fine. In fact they were so little on the plethora of internet websites I've visited so far that they could literally be counted on the fingers of one hand.

If they're consciously not writing on the forums, I'd encourage them to leave some feedback so that we can better understand why the game is so picky about on which system to run fine.

Maybe that's because I have an AMD card, maybe if it was an Nvidia card with 3+ GB VRAM I could use the ultra textures. I don't know. But I'm not going to bother myself with further research as I'm getting tired of this, so the readers/members here who happen to have such graphics cards and tried Watch_Dogs on their systems could feel free to contribute to the topic. As for me I'm done, I'm going to start the game on PS4 today. I'm glad that there are at least some people who can enjoy the game on PC, though.

 

Going to repost this that I put in theWorses thread, as for me it genuinely, genuinely sorts out the stutter ......

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OK people listen up. I've tested this game to death, and all these mods, and the one thing that's been holding the game, and the mods back, is the awful awful STUTTER.

After several days testing, I've concluded it is all down to texture settings. Bear with me.

The following is how I have fixed the stutter to make the game about 99% stutter free, really smooth, and I now can actually play the game

Before you start anything, as we all know SLI (And crossfire I think?) is currently ****ed in this game, so make sure you have WD set to use one card only, or turn SLI/CF off.

1. Update game to latest ubi patch
2. Download Maldos stutter fix version 2.0 - this combines/ includes TheWorses 0.7 files too. This is the key - I'm taking no credit here obviously. Maldos tweak and this specific file is the absolute must. The link is in this thread somewhere. I will link to it when I find it again....
EDIT Seems like things have moved - I *think* it's the WD PATCH FIX 2 file here: https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=23632...A9415BD522!157

3. Place the patch.dat and patch.fat files in the usual place, overwriting the current ones
4. Launch the game. I'm using the -disablepagefilecheck shortcut too, but this is largely unnecessary I think.
5. Put all settings to the max, but put shadows down to high, not ultra. This seems quite important. Motion blur off (personal preference), DOF on or off to personal taste. I quite like it on at the mo, but my mood changes

The next part is going to largely depend on what kind of monitor you have, and what refresh rates you can run at. Lots of folks have higher than 60hz screens now, or if not overclock a bit like I do. So, I have...

6. Set refresh rate to 75
7. Set vsync to "2". Very important. This runs your game at 'half refresh rate', so a vsync locked at 37 frames per second for me. It's not the golden 60fps, but it's smoooooth enough for this game.
8. Set max frames buffered to 2 (important).
9. Set AA to SMAA , or TXAAx2. More on this in a mo.
10. Now the killer setting - Texture - set this to medium. Now before everyone has a fit, Maldos mod employs some smart trickery in that if you set it to high, it's actually ultra, and therefore if you set it to medium, it's actually high. Don't ask me how, it's in Maldo's readme and decribed way earlier in this thread somewhere.

With these settings I get a perfectly smooth vsync locked 37 frames per second, with no stutter at all. It's absolutely glorious.

The one downside is the slight aliasing/ shimmering that you see on some textures which Maldo is obviously aware of. It's weird as it's only apparent on certain roads, and certain buildings in certain locations. One way to mitigate it is to run TXAAx2, which as many know is a bit blurry, but a quite nice in other ways AA method for nvidia cards. I'm running only one 780Ti out of 2 for WD so can just about maanage TXAAx2, lesser cards will struggle as it's quite GPU intensive in this game.

So, ultimately I'm running almost totally maxed out, using Theworses 0.7 mod, but with shadows set to high and textures at ('Maldo') high.

Until there's some other sort of official update or a driver update, this is the ONLY way I can run the game completely stutter free.

Hopefully Maldo is working on a newer, better texture patch so we may even be able to run at 'ultra' textures without any aliasing at all. Fingers crossed.

 

Not for nothing and I appreciate the post but to have to do all that to make a $70 game allegedly run right(ish) is insanity. I like the effort Maldo put in, and it's great he did it. But his stutter fix is aliased badly and looks worse than Vanilla.

I've already accepted my lose.. If Ubisoft fix it so be it but I'm not resting my laurels on it.

 

True. It is completely ridiculous really ain't it. But I reckon maldo might release a texture mod that sorts out the aliasing/ moire issues, and then it will be great.

Pc gaming should be renamed pc tweaking these days. A little bit can be fun but when it gets like this it's daft.

 

It makes you wonder if the point they pushed back the release to work on it more.. was it that point in time that they started working on porting it to PC?

Because honestly, It's a port, if this was originally designed to run on the PC, it would not run this badly.. Some of you guys have very powerful PC's, much more powerful than mine..

For me, what I am seeing on the screen is like this should not be making the game feel not smooth...

Like... some of you have Overclocked i7's with 4GB video cards... what are Ubisoft going to say??? Buy a better video card??

ohh wait they already did..

 

Regarding vram not being enough there's a very interesting test from a french site who shows that it doesn't really matter if u overload more than u have, at least to a certain limit I suppose:

comptoir-hardware.com/articles/cartes-graphiques/19714-test-la-consommation-memoire-dans-les-jeux-3d.html?start=4

Stuttering seems more related to game engine and game optimization, or system related, rather than the available amount of vram. Speaking of optimization before the patch I could only play at high textures and my 2GB were always saturated, after the patch I can finally use ultra textures, let's forget framerate at high speed car driving , and max I've seen in afterburner is 1.8 GB, and usually it's no more than 1.6, Ubipros...