So Watch Dogs 2 finally released on PC and being a Ubisoft game, a PC analysis has become a staple for informing people about the port. This is not a very in depth analysis with each and every second being taken into account, this is just a rough idea of what you might face during your playthrough.
Let’s get the system config out of the way first. My rig sported:
Intel i5-6500@ 3.2 GHz
Gigabyte Nvidia GTX 1070 OC at stock settings
Asus Z-170K Gaming Motherboard
8 GB of Kingston Hyper FuryX@ 2133 MHz
1 TB Seagate HDD@ 7200 RPM
With the rig out of the way let us get into the game.
At Ultra Preset Settings:
At Ultra settings (As you will see in the images below), I was able to theoretically average a 47 fps on 1080p. I was not able to capature the in game fps counter because if I used MSI or Steam overlay, then Nvidia overlay somehow got disabled, not sure why it happened. And this was indeed surprising for me. The more surprising fact was that the max fps was 112 and lowest was 5 fps (Probably in the loading times). And no, my CPU was not bottlenecking, because when I checked the CPU usage, it was at about 50-60%-ish and the RAM usage was at 5 GB approx.
As for the fps analysis, I noticed that there were huge frame drops while driving at very high speeds. The fps really tanked, giving me around 30-40 fps when in cities. When in open areas, the fps was more tolerable at about 50-60 fps even going as high as 70 in the grasslands, but it was never hitting that constant 60+ fps mark, when it was required to. I mean the fps was swinging back and forth while driving in the city, and it was very annoying. On foot, in the city areas, I was getting about 50-60 fps, and while in open areas I was getting about 60 fps more often than not. As for the number of crashes, in about 3 hours of playthrough I only ran into one crash, so that’s a plus.
At Extreme Preset:
This is not actually a preset in the game, I just named it for convenience, because even Ultra is not the highest setting in game, you can still push settings like Shadows, Anti-Aliasing, etc to the extreme right and not surprisingly enough, tis did not cause such a huge performance loss. With everything cranked up to the maximum possible settings I was getting practically the same performance, with differences of 4-6 fps here and there, so this might be a case poor optimizaton.
MSI Overlay was not working and hence I had to take images via a camera, sorry for the image quality.
So what are your experiences with the game? Mind you, this is the launch build without any updates. We might very well see updates rolling out by the end of this week, improving the performance, but as for my experience this was it. If the performance is any better on your PCs, do let us know. Adios.