Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus tonight and today we're gonna talk about the watchdogs at PC benchmarks I ran a couple of days ago I ran them on Tuesday when the game came out so we're just kind of recapping this here for the YouTube audience for those who are not in the loop I ran a series of video card benchmarks and one CPU benchmark with watchdogs and a PC game that is reportedly pretty poorly optimized so I explored that statement here in this in this article and now we're recapping in the video so here's here's the setup I tested watchdogs on these video cards a gtx 750ti and AMD 250x those are the two lowest end ones I tested on a 78 51 gigabyte card and r9 270x 2 gigabyte card a GTX 770 2 gigabyte card and r9 290x a 4 gigabyte monster card and a 780ti 3 gigabyte monster card finally I added a 4770k to the mix for determining if there is in fact a CPU throttle or bottleneck and other than that one CPU I used a 35 70 K from the Ivy Bridge line up for all tests so the only test we're 4770k was featured was with a 780ti and I did test this internally with other devices but did not publish the results because they were all frankly the same they were all very uninteresting so here's here's what we know first of all watchdogs have I been saying titanfall I feel like I've been saying whoa titanfall watchdogs is a very intensive game in terms of visuals but it doesn't necessarily look in a way that is corresponding to the frame rate so there's a big framerate hit it just it's not it's not this generations crisis that's all there is to it it looks good it doesn't look GPU mouthing good but there are optimization issues and it's on the software side AMD and NVIDIA have both put out drivers that helped a lot in this regard with AMD my testing determined up to 10.5 percent better with 14.6 catalyst over 14.4 they claimed 25% I believe that's only with the 290x and crossfire 10.5% within video there's pretty big gain also and in some cases the drivers are required to even make the game playable without blue screen of death so even with these drivers and graphics optimizations by the GPU manufacturers we still have serious FPS issues and let me show you let me show you what I mean the 780ti is a $720 video card it is a monster when I coupled this with the 4770k which is a 300 to $330 CPU and I used this on an internal z97 platform just for the record it was only at 53 FPS average when using ultra settings and max settings when I benchmarked with the PC so keep in mind this is a setup that would cost most users 1,500 to 2,000 dollars to get working and it's running 53 FPS with max settings that should never happen with a game that looks like watchdogs again looks good not amazing so why is that happening right that's the question why is this running so poorly well if we look at my GPU optimization guide or rather my watchdogs optimization guide since the GPUs are pretty good on their own we'll see that things like anti-aliasing have horrible effect on the game and don't necessarily produce a lot of visual fidelity in terms of quality of visuals so disabling MSAA 4x + or or dropping it down to temporal SMI a which is sort of a cheat anti-aliasing that I wrote about previously doing those things drop into temporal SMI a will nearly double the framerate it's like it goes from 53 FPS average to 90 with a 780ti so that's the first thing you need to know so disabling or minimizing AAA will improve your framerate but still ultra high medium texture resolutions doesn't matter what you use or how much ram your video card has I had almost the same performance when I kept all other settings identical except for texture resolution and that's kind of strange it doesn't normally happen it happened a little bit in titanfall but that was because the text resolution didn't actually impact visuals all that much not until you got too low so another issue we have with watch dogs is optimization as you decrease the settings I didn't only run these tests on ultra as you've seen thus far I also ran them on medium and on high and the purpose of that was just to see how the lower end video cards performed in those scenarios since it's not quite fair otherwise so so looking at medium the 780ti a 700 plus dollar video card with the 35 70k overclocked to 4.4 gigahertz and 16 gigabytes of very fast RAM we got 100 FPS and that was testing with temporal SMA AAA that's not with MSA a 4x or whatever its temporal SMA a which is the lower setting that has produced higher FPS results you'll notice that this is within the same realm when I said that playing on ultra with temporal SMA a with a 780ti produces about a 90 FPS so where 10 FPS faster by going to medium that tells us what it tells us that almost all the performance gain is in the AAA so something with anti-aliasing is horribly unwise in watch dogs to the point where you should not even be using it and actually I was speaking with with gadget from the build a PC Reddit and other edits and he has a 778 70 AMD GPU that has severe stuttering issues with certain types of anti-aliasing I was able to reproduce that finally after much effort on my to 70 guys you'll also notice that the GTX 770 program is about 85 FPS average on medium and then let's just skip a few of these going down to the 7850 is + + 250 X's of the world is where we start hitting the 50 and lower FPS range so that's when you start getting into unplayable territory on medium and need to drop to low so that's our our benchmark I'll throw up the the high one here again just so you can kind of read through that as I'm talking and the conclusion here first of all I want to make it very clear I am not yet commenting on whether watchdogs is a good game because I don't feel confident that I've played it enough from a gameplay stay and play standpoint to make that statement but strictly from a hardware perspective if you are set on playing this game and you're gonna build the system around it or your speck in your system around it or you're trying to make sure you can even run it before you buy it what you should know is that the 750ti hands down has the most impressive performance here everything else is sort of once you scale above that you're getting diminishing returns and once you go below that it's completely unplayable so with a 750ti with medium settings and temporal SMA I was able to produce nearly 60fps it was about 54 FPS on average with a 35 70 K and and then other than that everything's pretty normalized and uninteresting so that would be the card to get it's 150 bucks that would be the card to get if you're building around this game because it plays it well it produces a very smooth framelit frame rate excuse me I didn't have any frame drops like I did with some of the other cards even the 780ti had frame trapping issues it's kind of actually frankly outrageous but that that is the card I would look at beyond that you don't need to worry about CPUs almost at all because when we look between the 4770k and the 35 70 K which is a $100 difference and a one generation difference we see a half an FPS improvement which is within margin of error that's not even something that should be considered so for all intents and purposes that the two CPUs are identical the i7 on the i-5 are identical in performance for watchdogs so that's sort of the need-to-know information please check the link in the description below for the full article I will also link my new guide it's also a video guide on the channel for how to tweak a configuration file to improve watchdogs performance and that should hopefully help mitigate some of the FPS issues we're talking about here I've sort of determined that a lot of those manual tweaks will improve your overall performance and hopefully eliminate some of the crashing issues that have run rampant in the game for some users with some specific subsets of hardware please like comment and subscribe as always if you have any questions whatsoever leave them on the article linked below or on this video I will do my very best to answer them if I do not answer hit me again on the in the article and I will see you all next time peace