If i had to take a guess, i would say greed.:infinity: longevity is bad for them, they want people to upgrade often, so before your card becomes obsolete due to lack of power, it will hit a brick wall due to lack of vram. Also, it gives them slightly more profit by cheapen on vram i think. 🤓 Seriously, sony was able to put 8gb of GDDR5 in a 400 dollars machine, and Nvidia can't do the same with cards that cost u$500+.

Reducing unnecessary costs is important too. If there was no need for RAM, there shouldn't be more RAM than needed. Please, check the older graphics card reviews, these with more than standard amount of RAM. They were criticized for having too much as it was giving no performance boost, but was driving the price. Now, when the consoles have more RAM than they used to have, and the gaming resolution increased, so now 1920x1080 is pretty much standard, and 2560x1440 gets greater adoption among enthusiast, larger amounts of RAM on graphics cards are justified. Still, I wouldn't think that 8GB is expected on high-end graphics, except for ones targeting 4k+ gaming. Also, you're comparing apples to oranges - Sony doesn't need to make profit on PS4 hardware, while NV has to make profit on their cards. Where I have to agree with you on the greed aspect is that you actually can buy a card with lots of RAM. These are not GeForce, but Quadro and Tesla cards. And they cost a small fortune. By keeping a margin in RAM capacity between gaming and pro grade cards, the vendors are trying to justify the purchase of pro cards that are several times more expensive. But it gives them more money that can be spent on R&D, which otherwise would have to be obtained from the increase of price of regular gaming cards... it's not that simple. I don't really know how far the current sales and R&D models are far from ones optimal for the customers. Perhaps they're really close, perhaps very far. If one vendor would be much better for customers than other, while still satisfying the investors, they'd dominate the market, but the market is pretty stable. Another issue is that the current market is mature and the entry point is insanely high, preventing new vendors from emerging.

Developers are the ones dumbing their PC games down. Consoles are not the cancer, lazy devs are. Place your blame appropriately (preferably with your wallet).

Developers don't say "hey let's not make a good product for PC's.", it's the publisher that says "you have two months to make it work on PC, get it done." While this is Ubsioft who published it, it is also (some team) at Ubisoft that developed it. But looking at many aspects of the game having a polished quality, I'd take a guess it was, as most of the time, a financial decision to treat PC gamers as sewer rats.

Developers don't say "hey let's not make a good product for PC's.", it's the publisher that says "you have two months to make it work on PC, get it done." While this is Ubsioft who published it, it is also (some team) at Ubisoft that developed it. But looking at many aspects of the game having a polished quality, I'd take a guess it was, as most of the time, a financial decision to treat PC gamers as sewer rats.

I was kind of lumping publishers and developers into the same category. My point was more to say blame the people making the game, not the people making the platforms. Even in the heyday of PC gaming, consoles were around. To say they are the problem is not fair.

I had actually forgotten I had this game installed... I will try playing it now, hopefully it runs better now.

This is why i wait for steam sales get an updated game for cheaper price. sometimes i just pirate the game to try it out but i do believe in supporting devs so i end up buying it if its worth it.

Forgot about it as well :bang: Playing @1440p with just high settings on a GTX770 didn't work for me at the time. With this patch and a new GTX970 this should be about the right time to start playing Watch_Dogs properly. After I finish Shadow of Mordor, that is :P @TheWorse - would you please be so kind to create an even more final 1.1 mod for us? 😉

Reducing unnecessary costs is important too. If there was no need for RAM, there shouldn't be more RAM than needed. Please, check the older graphics card reviews, these with more than standard amount of RAM. They were criticized for having too much as it was giving no performance boost, but was driving the price. Now, when the consoles have more RAM than they used to have, and the gaming resolution increased, so now 1920x1080 is pretty much standard, and 2560x1440 gets greater adoption among enthusiast, larger amounts of RAM on graphics cards are justified. Still, I wouldn't think that 8GB is expected on high-end graphics, except for ones targeting 4k+ gaming. Also, you're comparing apples to oranges - Sony doesn't need to make profit on PS4 hardware, while NV has to make profit on their cards. Where I have to agree with you on the greed aspect is that you actually can buy a card with lots of RAM. These are not GeForce, but Quadro and Tesla cards. And they cost a small fortune. By keeping a margin in RAM capacity between gaming and pro grade cards, the vendors are trying to justify the purchase of pro cards that are several times more expensive. But it gives them more money that can be spent on R&D, which otherwise would have to be obtained from the increase of price of regular gaming cards... it's not that simple. I don't really know how far the current sales and R&D models are far from ones optimal for the customers. Perhaps they're really close, perhaps very far. If one vendor would be much better for customers than other, while still satisfying the investors, they'd dominate the market, but the market is pretty stable. Another issue is that the current market is mature and the entry point is insanely high, preventing new vendors from emerging.

Yeah, i know that sony doesn't make a profit on the ps4s sold. But we are comparing a whole machine vs a gpu, i read somewhere that sony loses only 50 bucks with each ps4 made, and they have to deal with R&D too. I do believe Nvidia could "spare" a bit more vram and still keep a good margin. Well, there's clearly a need for big bump on vram right now, take the gtx 780ti for example, it destroys ps4's gpu, costed almost twice at launch, but it has only the bare minimum of vram to run textures in the same quality as consoles in 1080p in a lot of upcoming games. I bet it won't take too long for the minimum to move to 4gb, and people with a beastly gtx 980 ,which wipes the floor with a ps4, will have to be content with console like textures, and we're still talking about 1080p, now imagine 1440p and even 4k. Nvidia surely likes selling the dream of the Pc untouchable gaming superiority over consoles(they certainly charge for it), so i think it's reasonable to expect them to be less cheap and really offer something that the considerably less expensive consoles can't touch in ANY aspect, at least that's what i think. Of course, it would probably make people stay more time with the same card instead of upgrading it, and that makes investors unhappy.

Yeah, i know that sony doesn't make a profit on the ps4s sold. But we are comparing a whole machine vs a gpu, i read somewhere that sony loses only 50 bucks with each ps4 made, and they have to deal with R&D too. I do believe Nvidia could "spare" a bit more vram and still keep a good margin. Well, there's clearly a need for big bump on vram right now, take the gtx 780ti for example, it destroys ps4's gpu, costed almost twice at launch, but it has only the bare minimum of vram to run textures in the same quality as consoles in 1080p in a lot of upcoming games. I bet it won't take too long for the minimum to move to 4gb, and people with a beastly gtx 980 ,which wipes the floor with a ps4, will have to be content with console like textures, and we're still talking about 1080p, now imagine 1440p and even 4k. Nvidia surely likes selling the dream of the Pc untouchable gaming superiority over consoles(they certainly charge for it), so i think it's reasonable to expect them to be less cheap and really offer something that the considerably less expensive consoles can't touch in ANY aspect, at least that's what i think. Of course, it would probably make people stay more time with the same card instead of upgrading it, and that makes investors unhappy.

Yeah. That reminds me that this weekend I updated the drivers and I was getting 170FPS in BF4, 1920x1200, details to high minus antialiasing (set to 0 for better clarity). The framerate in this game, and many others is awesome, but... this card has 2GB of RAM. I may say: Ha, I don't play Assassin's Creed! Ha, I don't play Watch Dogs! But Ubisoft will say: Ha, you're waiting for The Division! Well... sniff... I hope it'll run reasonably. Are there any reports about this patch? How does it work on hardware with limited VRAM?

It runs great now but i need for ultra textures 2xMSAA minimal 4gb of vram

one word, Ubisoft. Enough said. For this developer is dead on PC.

This. Boycot console games people, have some character.

It runs great now but i need for ultra textures 2xMSAA minimal 4gb of vram

Holy shizzle its difficult to understand what youre saying... but what i gather is that you need 4gb vram to be able to use 2x msaa along with ultra textures, which is pretty consistant with what ive experienced. With only 3gb vram, i have to choose between using high textures and msaa, or use ultra textures and smaa... i tend to go with the first option, as i cant stand jaggies.

The problem I was having before was: the game ran fine, but would eventually lag out to a stutter after and hour to hour and half or so of just idling it even, making it unplayable, because of the over memory usage. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/05/31/watch-dogs-graphics-problems I guess I'll have to reinstall it and and let it idle and see. A lot of time I see these patch notes / stories, as just a PR way to try and sell a few more copies.

Reducing unnecessary costs is important too. If there was no need for RAM, there shouldn't be more RAM than needed. Please, check the older graphics card reviews, these with more than standard amount of RAM. They were criticized for having too much as it was giving no performance boost, but was driving the price. Now, when the consoles have more RAM than they used to have, and the gaming resolution increased, so now 1920x1080 is pretty much standard, and 2560x1440 gets greater adoption among enthusiast, larger amounts of RAM on graphics cards are justified. Still, I wouldn't think that 8GB is expected on high-end graphics, except for ones targeting 4k+ gaming. Also, you're comparing apples to oranges - Sony doesn't need to make profit on PS4 hardware, while NV has to make profit on their cards. Where I have to agree with you on the greed aspect is that you actually can buy a card with lots of RAM. These are not GeForce, but Quadro and Tesla cards. And they cost a small fortune. By keeping a margin in RAM capacity between gaming and pro grade cards, the vendors are trying to justify the purchase of pro cards that are several times more expensive. But it gives them more money that can be spent on R&D, which otherwise would have to be obtained from the increase of price of regular gaming cards... it's not that simple. I don't really know how far the current sales and R&D models are far from ones optimal for the customers. Perhaps they're really close, perhaps very far. If one vendor would be much better for customers than other, while still satisfying the investors, they'd dominate the market, but the market is pretty stable. Another issue is that the current market is mature and the entry point is insanely high, preventing new vendors from emerging.

Sony does not need to make a profit on their hardware? So why do they not give away their PS4 for free? Are you kidding? If you are going to make a point, At'least try to make sense!