Watch Dogs runs like a poo (-rly optimized game)

Now, my system (HD6850 Gigabyte, Q8400, 3GB DDR2 400mhz) may be old and outdated, and it's age is definitely starting to show as new games come out - I'm well aware of that.

However, this does not excuse this game for running at sub-20 framerates ON THE LOWEST POSSIBLE SETTINGS (and I haven't even left the starting area, meaning that I haven't even visited the big, open areas which are the heaviest areas). It's a nice looking game, but it's certainly not pretty enough to justify having such dreadful performance - this machine is still definitely capable of playing games that come out today, and it most certainly ran games that were far prettier than Watch Dogs (Metro: Last Light, Witcher 2 and ArmA 3, Crysis 3 are great examples of that) and ran them much, much better, and with high graphics settings, too.

On top of poor framerates, this game has some dreadful stuttering, and texture popping.

And of course, catalyst 14.6 didn't help one bit with this, probably because (atleast, from what I've read), this game has Nvidia's cheeky "GameWorks" built-in, which means AMD aren't legally allowed to look at the game's engine to optimize it for their cards, and furthermore, if Nvidia want to deliberately bug the game to run poorly on AMD cards, they definitely can, and probably have, which in turn means that if you're using an AMD GPU - unless you have a really high-end AMD GPU, this game is a no-go for you, now and forever.

Is that true?

Well a few problems from the start you only have 3gb of ram, The game itself can use more then 2gb, which can mean alot of harddrive caching can happen with only 3gb, which will cause performance issues and stutter. Next your CPU is the bare minimum for this game. Then that 6850 isnt really much stronger then a 7770, which on high settings cant get 30 fps nor cab a GTX 560ti which is faster then that 6850. 2gb Vram is kinda needed. Only thing I can suggest besides upgrading would be to lower your resolution.

@04dcarraher: This game does nothing to justify it's unrealistically high demands. It just doesn't look that good.

You don't meet the minimum requirements for RAM or GPU, and your CPU is the minimum.

I see. It's gonna be a while until I actually get to play this, then. Oh well.

I would think the RAM is kicking your butt the most. Once you got the ram squared away you could probably turn down the resolution.

I have an I5 2500 3.3 ghz, 7950 3 gig w/boost GPU, 16 gigs of Kingston hyperx memory and on high the game runs choppy. I have the newest 14.6 AMD beta drivers. This is unacceptable. The game doesn't look great and runs choppy. Crysis 3, Metro low light, Battlefield 4 run like butter on this pc and look better.

eh i have a gtx 780 and a core i7 with the latest drivers. i get like an average 45-48 fps with everything on ultra and temporal smaa. something about the game just gives me a headache though, i think its the jaggies, though if i raise the aa, then i get the stutter problem everyone seems to get. i think i'll just wait on this game until some patches or fixes come out.

also the game really makes my video card whine, which makes me nervous

Runs smooth for me with a 670ftw/2500k/8gbddr3, on a mix of high and ultra with 2xTXAA and Vsync off. Looks really smooth and sits between 45-60fps pretty well all the time. No stuttering to speak of.

It pays having the most generic gaming rig possible

man, gaming on my 780 lately has ruined me. i literally can't play games below 60 fps anymore without feeling sick. its the weirdest thing, never used to be like that. sucks that i can't seem to keep watch dogs near 60 all the time

yea I know what you mean, I used to game at 30fps all the time when I had a weaker system, now I just can't do it. 40-50 is normally too low for me but i'm using a controller for WD so its not as noticable.

maybe try lowering a few settings like detail etc. and using TXAA instead of temporal SMAA, that should make it look smoother and maybe give you 60fps?

nah, neither are quite 60, and txaa is kinda blurry to me. though temporal smaa is mostly fine. though i have other things to play, i think i'll just hold out hope for some patches and/or advanced fixes

that system is kinda old but i its quad core right so you'd think it should run it pretty good at low settings.

I had similar cpu to you back in 2008, mine was the 2 core cpu called the E8400 and its core for core speed is pretty slow if compared to a modern i5 or i7 like the 2600k to the 4700k line. Crappy optimized games like this probably want more brute speed... worse yet the quad core of the wolfdale line of cpus were slower clocked core for core then the 2 core versions, so likely the cpu is bottlenecking it before your gpu.

May be time to upgrade cause lots of crappy ports are incoming from these consoles now.

Game runs great for me with many options set to Ultra and High. Now I expect that with my 4770k/ 7970ghz combo. I still heard tons of reports of AMD not doing to well but with those beta drivers it runs great. My problem with the game is I havent found it too fun yet and I have quickly been sucked back into Dark Souls 2(and Wildstar tomorrow).

Well you don't even meet the minimum requirement for this game. I understand it's a horribly optimized game but you have 3gb of ddr2 400mhz memory and your expecting to run modern games and an open world one at that? Your system might be able to play games from previous generations, as the console ports didn't require too much ram but not in this day and age with the current consoles with a minimum of 8gb ddr3 and ddr4 on the ps4. It looks like it's time to upgrade.

Don't even think on try and play badly optimized games with such an old rig

How can you tell it doesn't look that good when you are running it on minimal settings?

Your rig is outdated, either upgrade or stop acting like every new game has to run well.

I'm running it on Ultra settings with no performance problems at all, apart from the slight slutter that happens every few seconds when traveling at high speeds, which the dev knows about and is going to fix on the first patch.

High you mean? That 680 won't pull it off at ultra.

This game is horribly optimised. They should take it back and delay it for another few years until the developers testes drop. This game just proves the point of developers dumping trash on the consumers and expecting them to pay a premium for an unfinished game.

@horgen:

Actually it can if he has an dedicated harddrive and or using a SSD. Having Watchdogs on a separate drive or SSD lowers the thrashing causing the stutter

I know one thing, im not gonna pay anyone a goXXamn thing, even if i wanted to play this pro nvidia and even then badly optimized game. This isnt the first time they just dumped garbage piece of shit game onto the consumer.. All these fracking publishers care about is making for fracking money..

Just like EA is mikling Battlefield for all it worth, now bf3 is free download on origin, and we all remember how much crap BF4 was/is .. and now theyre comming with hardline. so forget about bf4 support..

I've got it running off the SSD. The only settings I have turned down a bit are Shadows and Anti-Aliasing since I always turn them down. V-Sync is OFF and everything else has the slider to max settings. Runs super smooth except for that driving stutter that the devs know about, but I managed to figure out it's actually the motion blur causing it, so if you turn that off it's a lot better.

running on a 7950 (280) with an i5 and it took me a while but I finally found the right settings I think that gives me the best performance while not missing much if anything at all graphically. For starters all my graphical settings are on ultra including textures (3GB of GDDR5 on the 7950). I turned off v-sync and lowered buffering to 1. Turned off AA. And then lowered the resolution on notch so it is between 900p and 1080p. Then in the AMD control panel I have EQAA on max and I have v-sync turned on. So I'm not running AA or V-sync through the game's application but through my card's instead. My performance has been rock solid since. It sucks that I have to run this at sub 1080p (still higher than 900p) to get good performance. I'll just stick with these settings till they patch it. The game is fun nonetheless. It still looks amazing and honestly i can barely tell the difference between 1080p and a notch below 1080p. I'm not too upset right now cause the game is very good and this is no where near as bad as the BF4 fiasco. Watch Dogs is at least playable at launch and with enough tweaking you can get good performance while still having the game look amazing.