Review of Watch Dogs Enhancements for SLI Systems
Review of Watch Dogs Enhancements for SLI Systems
For those of you out there playing Watch Dogs and using SLI, this is a post you are going to want to pay attention to. To begin, I want to get one thing out of the way. About a week ago there was this "ninja driver" that a lot of people got. The driver was a beta driver, numbered 337.81. Some people know it as the "Chinese Driver". Any who... Today comes along the new WHQL, which promised increased performance across many games and an "improved" SLI profile for the highly anticipated Watch Dogs. First lets debunk that last statement. There is absolutely no difference in any way, shape, or form in the SLI profile found within this latest driver, 337.88. Going all the way back to 337.50 the Watch Dogs profile has not budged an inch. Nothing has been changed. Here is a comparison of the two between 337.81 and 337.88. A blind man can see that these driver are identical. Okay, so no big deal Joker, right? Wrong. Now the game is on the verge of release. Some people, myself included, received their copy of the game legally because the vendors shipped them early. Other people have been playing the game all week thanks to some internet piracy. We will ignore those folks, though. Let's get down to the performance of the game. Its bad. REALLY REALLY BAD! I am running dual GTX 780's and I am seeing my frames drop into the mid 40's while driving around the city. The story is even worse during police chases with explosions going off, slo-mo cameras, and all the hacking stuff. During these sequences my FPS have dropped down into the TEENS! This is unacceptable. The dev's are pointing the finger at system specs of the users. Um, excuse me.. But how is my $3,000 computer not up to spec to run a modern game? I run Battlefield 4 on 64 player servers at 200 FPS without dropping a single fucking frame. Let's look at some screenshots. Note the bottom right corner for framerates. The dev's biggest thing they are telling us to do is turn down textures. So I tested this. Below are two screens. The first is at medium textures (the lowest they go) with every other setting on Ultra with 4x TXAA. The second screen is with Ultra textures and all other settings on Ultra with 4x TXAA. So looking at these we have a difference of a whopping 3 frames per second. With the only change being the textures from the lowest possible setting to the highest possible setting. Tell me how in the hell is this good optimization? How it the users fault for not having good enough hardware like they want us to believe? Don't worry it gets better. Now I am going to show you two more screen shots. Both of these are with every setting in the game on Ultra, including textures and with 4x TXAA. The difference? In the first screen I am using the Far Cry 3 SLI bits. The second one is using the Assassin's Creed III SLI bits. The reason for choosing these is that the Watch Dogs engine is a combination of two engine's. The Dunia engine (Far Cry 3) and the Anvil Next Engine (Assassin's Creed III) So there you have it folks. With just 15 minutes of my time I took 74 frames on ultra and turned that into 93 frames per second on ultra. Why can't Nvidia do this? Why can't the developer's do this? It isn't rocket science. It is pure laziness on the part of the developer's and the people at Geforce making these drivers. 19 frames might not seem like much, but what about a guy running a GTX 760 where that 19 frames could be the difference of the game being utterly unplayable and just playable enough. The effort is pathetic and as consumers, we deserve better.
This game is the next one with hardware problems, really clumsy, @ Misanthrope
I also discovered another method to enhance your experience; check out this screenshot. You'll notice the textures feel less detailed but it runs smoothly and is actually really enjoyable! For those missing the point, seriously take it seriously and save $45: http://store.steampowered.com/app/8190/
I also achieve a stable 60 fps at full settings with my 660 SLi configuration.