The 5700xt tanks using Ultra in Watch Dogs: Legions

Is the Drivers not optimized for ultra settings in this game? Or, are they using specific optimization is that benefit Nvidia using ultra? Because regardless of the resolution whenever ultra is use the performance tanks to 2060s levels.

 

Ultra tanks with every gpu. Use very high settings at 1440p.

 

I'd say wait on some updated drivers. It probably has Optimizations for Nvidia cards. My 3080 plays this fine at 4k Ultra. It'll get sorted.

 

You're pushing the card really hard using ultra in this games.

NVIDIA PCSS shadow filtering for sun and moon shadows, 8192x cascade shadows 4096x local shadow map resolution draw distance of really hefty on top of another doubling if you use the extended slider (Murdered performance in Watch_Dogs 2) what's next heavy screen-space shader reflections, filtering and distances and it's very close to the 7.5 GB VRAM cap optimal or actually above it which is not good for performance though you can clear it easily by skipping the ultra texture pack so down to V.High instead or lowering shadow quality skipping moon PCSS shadow filtering and cutting the shadow resolution by 1.5x to 2x and a good amount of VRAM gained. (80 - 85% I think was AMD's recommended max here.)

EDIT: I used the Xentax forum and the tool for unpacking some of the data files to get the base config files for more accurate comparisons.

https://pastebin.com/xBrNFtag

Gives a nice little overview of just how hard the PC_4 / Ultra preset is when it exceeds E3_Marketing (There's a console marketing preset too.) which is closer to PC_3 / V.High and then there's also presets for PS5 and X Series X which again they're lower.

The hardware in that 5700 / Navi 10 GPU is going to have to do a lot of heavy work putting it simply.

The NVIDIA 3080 is going to have to do some work to be a bit more direct on how demanding some of this stuff can be plus the CPU situation.

defaultthreadingconfig.xml

Hope that's not the actual situation where's the rest of the oh I don't know at least another four cores ideally scaling between eight or twelve.
(Hopefully that ideal relative thing means it can scale somewhat so it's not just brute forcing it but it scales poorly or little at all above a quad.)

Granted if this works the same as Dunia and Disrupt before adding the section and changing the values into the user XML / settings file should take priority but it could also be cleaned/purged and ignored.


EDIT: Which is a bit of a advanced crash course emphasis on crash but eh I wanted to know what Ultra actually was not just preset #1 to (up to) #4 and a bunch of vagueness at least the comparison images work fairly well to get a estimated impact on visual quality and maybe estimating that it's going to be a bit more demanding but not exactly how much.
(Granted the actual figures themselves and the full config doesn't answer that either other than pushing the LOD's and shadow resolution and what not to the max is going to make the game engine struggle even with D3D12 trying to help out some D3D11 bottleneck problems.)

 

Joker productions was dropping below 60fps at 4k ultra without raytracing. Thats not fine...

 

its almost like the ultra of this generation isn't the ultra of last generation games.

 

Ultra is not for gaming only for screenshots, right?

 

Well, yes.

 

Thanks for the replies.

I believe jonasbeckman answered best though. It appears that Ultra does indeed have specific Nvidia optimizations that tank performance on AMD cards.

The issue is not the fact that performance drops going from Very high to Ultra. The issue is that even though performance drops it drops worse for the 5700 xt. Even though the 2070 s shares a similar architecture design as the 5700xt. They both have 8gb vram. Yet the 2070s sails right through ultra. Albeit lower performance.

In which the 5700 XT is no better than a 2060 s. There is some artificial limit being imposed on the AMD card that drops performance like a rock. Similar to what tessellation has done for AMD back during Crysis 2 debacle. It simply appears to me that it's only being done on the ultra settings to keep from having a controversy.

 

@JonasBeckman
Does the to work for repacking?

 

Yeah to an extent you get PCSS and maybe HBAO(+) and I would say it's also just pushing above the hardware the 5700(XT) has coupled with what looks like limited CPU scaling though I've only seen some tests so far but it aligns with the data I can see scaling more for clock speeds and efficiency over having additional cores. (Good effect for the Intel's less than optimal for the AMD's where the Ryzen 3000's falls behind more noticeable as a result.)

This explains the water performance for example if you set the quality presets to Ultra and poke around in the Thames.

Building culling distance in particular goes way up and you have to deal with 4x MSAA as well plus a larger camera cubemap texture size so a more detailed resulting reflection from it.
(2x MSAA on all other PC presets below these.)

Shadows is this, it's the other setting I find that does things to the framerate although testing like Hardware Unboxed also shows that using a 3080 I believe and registering a 30% I think performance difference between V.High and Ultra.


Not too surprising.

8192 shadows, 4096 and then the cascade shadows distances and such, NVIDIA PCSS plus moon PCSS and what SSLS is I am not 100% on all these short terms hah.
(Soft-Shadow something something perhaps?)

Might be possible to tweak specifics through the game settings XML same as Far Cry 3 to Far Cry 5 and Watch Dogs but I haven't gotten started on that yet.
Assuming it works staring into the Thames should no longer do funny things to the framerate counter so at least there's a pretty clear tell for it ha ha.


EDIT: There's also Prospero and Anaconda for the PS5 and X Series X plus Lockhart for the X Series S from my current comparions it's V.High with a bunch of ultra settings for the more demanding things and then a hefty reduction closer to medium for ray tracing.

 

@JonasBeckman

I got you. However it still doesn't explain why a 2070 s does not suffer the same performance penalty as a 5700 XT. Why is a 5700xt with ultra no better then a 2060s? Are those predefined settings the same between nvidia and Amd? Because at this point something graphically for nvidia isn't either set as high or not working.

This doesn't add up. For someone with a 2070 s they wouldn't need to tweak the XML files. They both have 8 gigabytes of RAM. And both have similar architectural design. With the difference being developer relations and the drivers.

I have to wonder if these image quality conditions are also found for the 2070 s????

Because I don't believe it to be the case. If so, whats different??

 

AMD's traditionally been terrible at MSAA performance it tanks the GPU hardware I'm not too sure on the specifics and I know the RDNA1 instruction set or the Navi hardware has improvements since Vega but it's still a tough effect.


Shadows are fill rate and rasterization too I think and you have NVIDIA getting the advantage with PCSS performance.
Also the advantage with draw calls and working better under CPU constrained situations which it seems this game hits even before the extended view distance comes into effect.

EDIT: Hmm actually the 5700 XT's not too terrible in that test V.High I think is 4x whereas Ultra is 8x by default and there's a 15% difference to the 2070 S for the 5700XT not the 5700

In a game where NVIDIA has a bit of a advantage performance wise.


EDIT: That's just one part though it doesn't factor in outside of the water reflection and that's pretty much only Thames not random SSR puddles during rainy weather though there's the occasional smaller water source in a few parks and such.
Watch_Dogs Legion does skip MSAA traditional anti-aliasing (And TXAA) so you're going to be using TAA which is also mandated for when using some of the effects above High.

There's also the draw calls and geometry performance, Ubisoft pushed a ton of that through Assassin's Creed Origins and Odyssey and back with Watch_Dogs 2 if the extended draw distance was set which from what I tested worked well up until 50% and then it encountered problems with stuttering and hitching and larger performance drops.

There's D3D12 here so it's less of a problem but there's potentially worse CPU scaling whereas AC Origins and Odyssey scale up to 8 - 12 cores though not fully but fairly OK.

That could be part of the issue as well and a bottlneck problem for AMD.
(Also NVIDIA but not as extensively though even with brute force the results are not exactly too impressive for how much hardware Ampere has.)

 

Lets say it right:
Any Ubisoft game(not matter what engine-Anvil+++ or Dunia+++) suffer from lazzyness or bad port or ugly&old engine. (well maybe FC series do not suffer as other games from them)
Look at Assassins Creed Oddysey or Origins or Watch Dogs 2 or this "Legions",those games have shaitty performance,dont know why these games are benchmarked.
(MS Flight Sim is in the same boat,until they put it on DX12 engine)

 

Will be interesting to see if there's tests done after the November patch and the later December patch (Multiplayer update.) if that improves the game side of optimization and performance gains and also newer NVIDIA and AMD drivers plus the new 6000 series GPU's from AMD.

EDIT: And comparisons with Valhalla and later on Far Cry 6

Anvil vs Dunia vs Anvil-Dunia/Disrupt.

EDIT: Oh and Zen3 in what Friday for retailers and thus Thursday for reviews maybe?

 

Their 1st patch was to improve performance for the RTX only. It appears they could care less for the RX series.

@JonasBeckman are you saying they are using 4x/8x MSAA in an open world game???

Thats atrocious. Thats why they came up with taa, etc. I'm not buying "bad port". What it looks to me to be is an issue is a lack of finer granual iq control. For one this auto msaa.

 

For reflections but not fully but still a thing.
Watch_Dogs 2 had MSAA in addition to FXAA, SMAA and through a patch SMAA T2X though it was unstable at lower framerates (Ghosting) plus a simpler form of TAA.
MSAA mostly existed due to NVIDIA support with TXAA.

Watch Dogs Legion has MSAA for the water reflections similar to GTA V and Red Dead 2 but drops the "world" MSAA in favor of a new mode of TAA which you might have noticed is also required for certain effects at the higher settings.
Could perhaps also be compared to hairworks MSAA which up until Vega and then the Navi10 caused additional performance problems for AMD in Witcher 3 though the developers made it configurable however anything less than 8x just isn't very effective but it really helps GPU performance especially for AMD.
(Hopefully Witcher 3 D3D12 or Vulkan or whatever the re-release uses will utilize a form of TAA instead but that's just a guess we'll see might have hairworks MSAA still with game TAA support.)

It should be easy enough to see what some of the higher settings for water and reflection quality does to Watch_Dogs Legion's performance on AMD GPU's just go to the Thames anywhere is fine and look straight across the framerate should get really low, then with culling and how the tech works go into the water and look straight down it should be closer now to nearly single digit performance.

I still have to test and see if that resolves just from lowering MSAA to 2x and how badly it breaks at 0x because there's no preset where this isn't disabled instead reflections disable entirely making the water look almost pitch black especially at night.
PS5 Prospero and X Series X Anaconda both use 4x for the presets here but there's no telling if this is the finalized settings or just adapting a mix of WIP starting from PC V.High and working up besides tessellation which is reduced a bit more.

But that doesn't have to mean much other than the 6000 series GPU is going to be faster since MSAA can be handled differently on consoles like a number of other bottlenecks and issues that happens on PC.
(Though there's still a cost for using it even if it's "just" reflections.)


So yeah temporal AA but the reflections as to not look too rough since we're still getting a lower resolution image is resolved or enhanced by using MSAA same as a few other games although GTA and Red Dead can to my knowledge also use geometry MSAA for the game itself combined with reflection MSAA and I would assume Red Dead 2 uses TAA as well in some form as the new method for anti-aliasing effective but with some drawbacks like blurriness and occasional ghosting/instability especially at lower framerate numbers.


EDIT: Could be problems as well if you have any AA overrides active although it should be more on visual glitches like in Assassin's Creed Origins and Odyssey than anything else.
(But I don't think these apply for when using D3D12 - Or Vulkan not that Legion uses this API.)

When using the dynamic anti-aliasing option it tries to scale to a framerate target and dynamic resolution through a MSAA effect to improve image quality, less costly due to the lower render resolution there.
(MSAA to I think it's enhanced in Radeon Settings causes weird outlines in the game if set.)

 

Looks like I found a fix.
Use Intelligent Standby List Cleaner aggressively and the frame rates never regress.

 

Huh that issue should have been resolved in Windows 10 itself in one of the earlier builds, cached memory / stand-by memory cleanup working for this game is interesting, curious to hear it still has a use after that was fixed.
Game could be leaking or paging data heavily though due to issues that needs to be patched so maybe that's a possibility.

 

I knew it
I knew it
I freaking knew it!!!!!!!


30:48 MLID CONFIRMS that Watch Dogs: Legions was specifically designed for Nvidia and used Nvidia's Blackbox code for ray tracing.

So all that added IQ settings were specifically tailored for Ampere hardware. Creating a more taxing experience. IE: Like Crysis 2 with underground tessellated water, etc.