Watch Dog 2: PC graphics performance benchmark review

Posted on: 12/02/2016 10:41 PM

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I am getting very tired of your behavior and ignorance. I suggest you step out of this discussion.

Posted on: 04/24/2018 10:51 AM

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I'm sorry for posting in this probably dead thread but lookd like the words "hiccups is probably the only legit issue..." and "game runs smoothly and optimized" are contradicting.

I have i7 6700k@4.6Ghz, RAM 32GB@3000MHz, 1080Ti@2050Mhz, Samsung 960Pro 1TB, run the game on 3440x1440 resolution, 1.25 pixel density, ultra settings, without fog and motion blur, temporal filtering is on. And after 1.5-2 hours of playing terrible hiccups and shuttering start to exist. You could say "get more processor cores" and you would be wrong. During these first two hours although 6700k is melting on 65-95% game runs like butter, GPU load is always 98-99% and there is no any FPS drops or hiccups whatever place I go or whatever I do in game. But after a while some small frametime spikes appear and then more and more. Ending up with terrible shuttering every few minutes. Interesting that during these shutterings both CPU and GPU usages are dropping. Temperatures are fine, I have AIO watercooling on both CPU and GPU (both have 55C max during the game). Frequencies don't drop too. Looks like there is something with game memory usage. Maybe it is something with net code because usually I'm playing single missions mixed with multiplayer ones. Lowering any settings (even all together) doesn't help. Full game restart does.

This particular scenario no way will be catch by any web reviewers. And regular gamers will think they need an upgrade. I'm monitoring all this stuff by MSI Afterburner and its overlay's graphs and I barely can say the game is "well optimized".

Regarding temporal filtering - it is obviously a dirty trick by ubisoft. They use it by default in all their last games. I saw it by myself in The Division in a form of light trails of a character in a sunny scene. It is not so obvious like in WD2 just because of lack of fast moving and also is not visible in screenshots due to temporal nature. It is not "cool now-how", without TF all their games will run just like crap on nearly all hardware during game launch. Why don't Witcher or Battlefield or GTA or anyone except Ubisoft use TF? Maybe because Ubisoft clearly became kind of games "conveyor assembly"? They not only have same graphic engine and game mechanics among the games but even same graphic assets sometimes. They have no time&resources for properly optimize and polish their games like other developers, they just hurry to make money.

Posted on: 04/24/2018 11:16 AM

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Sounds like a VRAM leak particularly for that resolution with an extra 25% on top but it's been a long time since I last checked up the game and what it was doing.
(AMD GPU after all, the game is quite tough on these ha ha though the low VRAM amount for this particular model also plays a role I suppose and the game has long since stopped receiving further updates so no chance of a fix if there is a memory leak.)

Posted on: 04/25/2018 11:38 AM

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But that what I described happens on 1080Ti with 11GB VRAM. The game consumes ~6GB max (checked by realtime monitoring). I'm going to check VRM temps on motherboard but unlikely the problem is there - there is Asus Maximus VIII Hero, it should easily handle such overclock (i7 6700k@4.6GHz@1.35V).

Looks like the problem is with engine itself like someone mentioned previously the game is designed for unified memory of consoles. But this is a problem of developers. I'm as a consumer sure that this situation can't be called "good port" or "smooth performance".

Posted on: 04/25/2018 12:32 PM

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Right, the 1080Ti would have 11 out of 12 GB total for the Pascal chip used in the Titan, not 8 GB I messed that up.

Still if it consumes 6 GB after monitoring that's within capabilities and with 32 GB system RAM that's not going to be a issue either, unless there's leaks to the page or swap file or on the CPU side of things such as how it's doing threading and handles.
Guessing the only solution is to periodically shut the game off and restart it again, all of these would be cleared though tracking down exactly what's going on well that would probably need Ubisoft having the source code so no chance of it being patched.

Both AMD and NVIDIA have their display driver quirks too but that tends to have other symptoms, I don't know very much about the more in-depth workings of either though and monitoring and trying to check what the game is doing is not too helpful either if it can't be solved which is unlikely to happen with Ubisoft having moved on to the sequel I believe or other projects also currently in development.
(Watch_Dogs 2 coming out a bit before Ubisoft went all in with their long-term support and Gaming as a Service having support for a year or more instead of a few months which I think the game was actively updated for 6 - 8 months or so but there were known issues after the final patch was released, probably still a number of posts about these on both the Steam and UPlay/Ubisoft forums.)

And far as reviews and benchmarks go well RAM and VRAM usage over a long period of time is rare to see tested, four to six hours of active game time instead of running a specific benchmark scene or such to test a number of different hardware in a shorter period of time.


Final Fantasy 15 on PC has that issue with leaking to the page file periodically despite RAM or VRAM amount in the system it's run on, Assassin's Creed Origins is quite heavy on the CPU usage (Some WM thread in particular taking up a large part of that games CPU usage total.) and Far Cry 5 puts a lot of CPU time on a telemetry related thread for something called Bloomberg and related to data gathering for what I guess is troubleshooting purposes or diagnostics data.

FF15 is the only one that would crash after a period of time though and it's not seen on every system, other two examples just has a performance deficit as a result and a modern CPU with a hexa core or better would not be too affected.

EDIT: Doubt I would get much info out of Watch_Dogs 2 and I'm not that skilled either though it would be very interesting to see what's going on with the game and what it's doing though it could be related to a lot of different factors.