Watch Dogs Performance | SLI Improvements

[NBKJOKER732]

For those of you out there playing Watch Dogs and using SLI, this is a post you are going to want to pay attention to. To begin, I want to get one thing out of the way. About a week ago there was this "ninja driver" that a lot of people got. The driver was a beta driver, numbered 337.81. Some people know it as the "Chinese Driver". Any who... Today comes along the new WHQL, which promised increased performance across many games and an "improved" SLI profile for the highly anticipated Watch Dogs. First lets debunk that last statement. There is absolutely no difference in any way, shape, or form in the SLI profile found within this latest driver, 337.88. Going all the way back to 337.50 the Watch Dogs profile has not budged an inch. Nothing has been changed. Here is a comparison of the two between 337.81 and 337.88.

 

 

A blind man can see that these driver are identical. Okay, so no big deal Joker, right? Wrong. Now the game is on the verge of release. Some people, myself included, received their copy of the game legally because the vendors shipped them early. Other people have been playing the game all week thanks to some internet piracy. We will ignore those folks, though. Let's get down to the performance of the game. Its bad. REALLY REALLY BAD!

 

I am running dual GTX 780's and I am seeing my frames drop into the mid 40's while driving around the city. The story is even worse during police chases with explosions going off, slo-mo cameras, and all the hacking stuff. During these sequences my FPS have dropped down into the TEENS! This is unacceptable.

 

The dev's are pointing the finger at system specs of the users. Um, excuse me.. But how is my $3,000 computer not up to spec to run a modern game? I run Battlefield 4 on 64 player servers at 200 FPS without dropping a single fucking frame. Let's look at some screenshots. Note the bottom right corner for framerates. The dev's biggest thing they are telling us to do is turn down textures. So I tested this. Below are two screens. The first is at medium textures (the lowest they go) with every other setting on Ultra with 4x TXAA. The second screen is with Ultra textures and all other settings on Ultra with 4x TXAA.

 

 

 

So looking at these we have a difference of a whopping 3 frames per second. With the only change being the textures from the lowest possible setting to the highest possible setting. Tell me how in the hell is this good optimization? How it the users fault for not having good enough hardware like they want us to believe? 

 

Don't worry it gets better. Now I am going to show you two more screen shots. Both of these are with every setting in the game on Ultra, including textures and with 4x TXAA. The difference? In the first screen I am using the Far Cry 3 SLI bits. The second one is using the Assassin's Creed III SLI bits. The reason for choosing these is that the Watch Dogs engine is a combination of two engine's. The Dunia engine (Far Cry 3) and the Anvil Next Engine (Assassin's Creed III)

 

 

 

So there you have it folks. With just 15 minutes of my time I took 74 frames on ultra and turned that into 93 frames per second on ultra. Why can't Nvidia do this? Why can't the developer's do this? It isn't rocket science. It is pure laziness on the part of the developer's and the people at Geforce making these drivers. 19 frames might not seem like much, but what about a guy running a GTX 760 where that 19 frames could be the difference of the game being utterly unplayable and just playable enough.

 

The effort is pathetic and as consumers, we deserve better.

[Destin]

Day 1 patch pls

[Guest]

@NBKJOKER732

Hey, no 760 hate

[acidydragon]

Hey, no 760 hate

Please don't quote the ENTIRE OP...

[Guest]

Please don't quote the ENTIRE OP...

Wup, done.

[acidydragon]

Wup, done.

Thanks

[AlexGoesHigh]

LMAO, this game is the next ghost on hardware issues, just stupid,

 

@Misanthrope

[Misanthrope]

I also found another way to optimize your experience, take a look at this screenshot:

 

 

As you can see the textures and fidelity is much lower but it runs buttery smooth and it's actually fucking fun to play!

 

To those not getting the joke, seriously get this and save $45:http://store.steampowered.com/app/8190/ 

[SkilledRebuilds]

So if one man, curiously tweaks and finds this out... and does apply it within "minutes" and gets a benefit.

^Good on ya btw, I'm sure this tidbit will help someone..

 

 

Nvidia/AMD/Devs - What the hell are you guys doing with your time....?

[MadManMarsBar]

Hmmmm well i get a solid 60 fps @ max-settings with my 660 SLi setup

[CatCloud]

Yeah my experience with the game is bad, using a 690 here though but man its unplayable. 
With that said, im going to bed and cry! i had plans to not to and actually force my self to stay awake but eff it. might as well call my boss and say i want to work overtime.

[NBKJOKER732]

Hmmmm well i get a solid 60 fps @ max-settings with my 660 SLi setup

 

Highly unlikely. The game is not optimized right now, and who knows if it will ever be. The game is poorly optimized and the SLI is even worse, I'm afraid. You are best off waiting until they get it sorted out. 

[Exotath]

So ok, you lost me.... what exactly did you do to get the FPS improvement?

[NBKJOKER732]

So ok, you lost me.... what exactly did you do to get the FPS improvement?

 

I changed the SLI bits in Nvidia Inspector. I tried using the Far Cry 3 bits and then the Assassin's Creed 3 bits since Watch Dogs engine is a combination of those engines used for those two particular games. You can get to the SLI bits by opening Nvidia Inspector and clicking the wrench icon. Then change the SLI bits as seen in the picture below

 

So basically you just click the SLI bits and copy/paste the entire line into the same place but under the Watch Dogs profile. There is a drop down top left that you can use to navigate to watch dogs or just start typing watch dogs and it will pop up. When you are done hit apply changes (top right). If you like the changes, keep it. If not you can restore back to default very easily.

 

[kingalex]

soooo i did that ... and its still at like max 45 fps down to 15 on damn-low settings.

i got the 650m sli... so annoying. u know a fix?

[NBKJOKER732]

This along with using the Far Cry 3 SLI bits is now giving me an average of 110 FPS, with my frames sometimes going north of 150 with v-sync off.

 

Credit for this goes to, Zawad Iftikhar. His full article with a host of other fixes can be found HERE.

 

"If you have a high-end PC and want to avoid any graphics and performance issues before Ubisoft fixes the game, you should run game while AA turned Off, GPU Rendering Set to 1 and Vsync Turned Off.

 

Moreover, using Nvidia Control Panel, you should enable FXAA, set Anisotropic Filtering to 16X, enable AA Mode Override, set AA Settings to 32XCSAA, set AA Transparency to 8X, Set Max Pre-Rendered Frame to 1 (Optional), set Multi Display to 1, select Prefer

 

Maximum Performance and turn off Texture Filtering.

 

Make sure you have Clamp and Threaded Optimization On. Test turning on/off Vsync to see what reduces stuttering and based on that, set it. AMD Graphics users can replicate similar settings in Catalyst Control Panel."

 

-Zawad Iftikhar

 

P.S. Also worth noting you are running 650m's in SLI. A desktop 650 is an extremely low end card and can barely run modern games. The "m" or mobile models are even worse and are usually equivalent to the previous generation desktop version of the processor. One example would be the 680m. The 680m is equivalent in specs to a desktop version 670. My suggestion would be to lower the game down to 1280x720 and the absolute lowest possible settings and you MIGHT get a playable framerate. Honestly, you would get better performance on a Playstation 4 then you would with that laptop. "Gaming" laptops are never a good idea, even for entry level gamers. You are always better off building  your own budget PC. You could easily put together a $500 build that would give double the performance of your gaming laptop. I learned this from personal experience. Gaming laptops just shouldn't even exist.

[TheGamingLawNL]

So I tried this all but I am still getting massive stuttering and FPS drops.

 

I7 4770k

SLI GTX 780

16GB 1600Mhz Ram

 

So good to go, game is even on an SSD.

 

Anything else to try? (most of the stuttering gets fixed by setting textures to normal though) Even with 2GB of VRAM usage it goes wrong. Weirdly enough.

 

My experience so far with the attempted fixes and combination of those 2.

 

Ultra and TXAA 4x

Heavy stuttering sometimes dropping to 28 FPS but on average drops from 80 to 30. With Vsync from 60 to 30. I don't even have to do much. The only moment I get this game running smooth is on Normal. Not even high is letting me play normal. Which is weird..

 

 

Edit: I just noticed that when you allow the game to just use 2GB of VRAM it uses 3GB and when textures on Ultra it is trying to acces more than 3GB. Even on Normal Textures my GPU's are using 2,3GB. Is this just my game?

[NBKJOKER732]

So I tried this all but I am still getting massive stuttering and FPS drops.

 

I7 4770k

SLI GTX 780

16GB 1600Mhz Ram

 

So good to go, game is even on an SSD.

 

Anything else to try? (most of the stuttering gets fixed by setting textures to normal though) Even with 2GB of VRAM usage it goes wrong. Weirdly enough.

 

My experience so far with the attempted fixes and combination of those 2.

 

Ultra and TXAA 4x

Heavy stuttering sometimes dropping to 28 FPS but on average drops from 80 to 30. With Vsync from 60 to 30. I don't even have to do much. The only moment I get this game running smooth is on Normal. Not even high is letting me play normal. Which is weird..

 

 

Edit: I just noticed that when you allow the game to just use 2GB of VRAM it uses 3GB and when textures on Ultra it is trying to acces more than 3GB. Even on Normal Textures my GPU's are using 2,3GB. Is this just my game?

 

Try doing what I posted in the comment above yours with disabling AA in game and doing it through the control panel. Above post has full instructions and link. The fixes are under #3 on this post HERE.

[TheGamingLawNL]

Try doing what I posted in the comment above yours with disabling AA in game and doing it through the control panel. Above post has full instructions and link. The fixes are under #3 on this post HERE.

 

Yeah I tried that too. It's not running good at all for me.

 

I'll just post what I did as I had to translate it all so I might have been doing something wrong?

 

 

 

 

 

Translated from top to bottom:

 

Ansitropic Filtering: 16x

AA FXAA: On

AA Gammacorrection: Default (On)

AA Setting - 32x CSAA

AA Mode: Increase/enhance programsetting (badly translated sorry)

AA Transparency: 8x (supersample)

CUDA GPU - Default (all)

Triple Buffer: Default (off)

Energycontrol - Adaptive

Max Pre rendered frames - 1

Multi Screen/Scrambled GPU accelaration: Single Monitor Performance mode

Ambient Occlusion: (unavailable)

SLI Render Mode: Single GPU (now this is where I wasnt sure if I did it right (it did decrease stutter though))

Shader Cache - Default

Texturefilter- Antisotropic example: Off

Texturefilter Quality - Performance

Texturefiler Negative LOD-Bias - Clamp

Texturefilter Trillinair optimizing - On

Thead optimimizing - Off

Vsync - Off (also tried on)

[NBKJOKER732]

 

In this screenshot it shows "Maximale vooraf gerenderde frames" set to 4. This should be set to 1. That is the max pre-rendered frames.

 

If you continue to have issues, my best advice is to wait. The dev's are aware of many issues and working on a patch. HERE is a link to a Ubisoft thread. On there they are explaining the known issues and what is being done to address those issues. The poster on that thread is from the Ubisoft team so if anyone knows what is going on, its this guy. Twitter is also a good resource. I have had many questions answered on there from Jonathan Morin, one of the development leads.

 

 

 

[TheGamingLawNL]

 

 

In this screenshot it shows "Maximale vooraf gerenderde frames" set to 4. This should be set to 1. That is the max pre-rendered frames.

 

If you continue to have issues, my best advice is to wait. The dev's are aware of many issues and working on a patch. HERE is a link to a Ubisoft thread. On there they are explaining the known issues and what is being done to address those issues. The poster on that thread is from the Ubisoft team so if anyone knows what is going on, its this guy. Twitter is also a good resource. I have had many questions answered on there from Jonathan Morin, one of the development leads.

 

 

 

 

 

Yeah that was a secondary test I uploaded the wrong picture at first. I first tried at 1 then at 4 just to test. Didn't help either.

[NBKJOKER732]

I would just wait then. You have 780's like me, but you actually have a better CPU for this game so you should be able to play at a reasonable framerate. If you can't get it to the point where its playable, I would just wait for an update from Ubisoft or Nvidia. You're running the latest driver right? 337.88. I heard other people had success by updating their BIOS, but I can't say for sure if that would help you. 

[TheGamingLawNL]

I would just wait then. You have 780's like me, but you actually have a better CPU for this game so you should be able to play at a reasonable framerate. If you can't get it to the point where its playable, I would just wait for an update from Ubisoft or Nvidia. You're running the latest driver right? 337.88. I heard other people had success by updating their BIOS, but I can't say for sure if that would help you. 

 

At this point I can only play well without stuttering on Normal with Normal Textures weirdly enough. My last BIOS update was 2 weeks ago but I will check again And for Nvidia 337.88 since release Might also redownload that one. Judging by the things Ubi is listing it's probably better to wait

[NBKJOKER732]

I'll get you some screenshots of my exact settings tomorrow morning so you can make sure we are on the same page. Since our rigs are almost the same there is no reason you can't run it at ultra.

[TheGamingLawNL]

Really? You wonder why the game doesn't hit higher frame rates? You turn up the postprocessing in the NVidia Control Panel, and turn up settings there where you won't even see ANY difference? Now, that's what I call stupid...

 

Kid, if you can't state something usefull I'd just say stay away allright?