Watch dogs performance issues

[Meridean]

i have been having some serious problems with watch dogs lately, im sure it has to do with my cpu creating and artificial bottleneck in the game. my gpu will be running around 50% at all times, near ultra. thats all fine and stuff...... but the real problem is frame dips and spikes, depending on what im doing in the back ground, seems all normal until you see what % your cpu is running at, all cores without anything running while ingame are around 50-60%, and ill be getting bad performance, 30-40 fps, horrible.... while driving even worse, i was forced to turn down my settings in order to play.... its obviously some sort of cpu limitation since my friend who has an i7 3770k is running smooth everything at its max 60 fps or more, but what i noticed while messing around is that if i ran a program that forces say, a 10% workload on my cpu while running the game it will bump all or a few cores up to 70%, but then it gradualy goes back down to 60%, and  my fps drops even further, as if there where some sort of usage per core limitation built into the game itself... im not sure if this is the case but if so its quite infuriating, seing how i cant use my hardware in their games, or their newest games to its full potential. it seems like it would impose an unnesascary reason to buy more expensive hardware to play a game that should in theory run just fine on my current hardware if it werent running my cpu as if it where a pentium. again im not sure, but from what i saw it was not taking full advantage in any way shape or form of my hardware. their previous titles far cry 3 for example on max ran smooth 60 fps took full advantage of my cpu did great. but with their current reputation, and horrible handicapped performance in this game i wouldent put it past them to have intentionaly put a cap on what it can use in order to force people to purchase more expensive hardware. but if thats not the case can anyone explain to me why its lagging so horribly on my 7970, also the processor is an FX 8120 overclocked to 4.5 ghz

[Levent]

game is not heavily optimized for multi threading and FX8120 has a terrible single threaded performance.

[Vrbas]

game is not heavily optimized for multi threading and FX8120 has a terrible single threaded performance.

The game is optimized for multi threading. That's Why the i7 out performs the i5 in this game.

As for your problem I don't think it's your cpu. I have a fx 8320 and it isn't bottlenecking me. The game isn't well optimized for amd in general at the moment. I would just blame it on the game.

[Meridean]

ahh yea, i changed it to realtime priority, works significantly better

[TAK]

Mine has crashed a lot more since the "Hey let's fuck over that thing that makes us look stupid(er)" aka patch. Also the frame drop during driving got worse with the patch... And IIRC it still uses the same amount of vram, even tho I dropped most of it to High from Ultra, FPS went up a little tho.

FTR, 4670K and a 4GB GTX 770.

[helping]

FTR, 4670K and a 4GB GTX 770 on High

christ that sounds awful, that combination should handle anything at 1080p.

I was almost feeling up to 'acquiring' watch dogs since I really don't want to support Ubisoft, but that's extreme off-putting.

[TAK]

christ that sounds awful, that combination should handle anything at 1080p.I was almost feeling up to 'acquiring' watch dogs since I really don't want to support Ubisoft, but that's extreme off-putting.

Luckily I got my game with the GTX, I would be way more pissed if I had actually paid for it.

Also, the 4GB card was only slightly more than the 2GB card and I figured it would help with WD, no such luck tho.

[Vrbas]

Luckily I got my game with the GTX, I would be way more pissed if I had actually paid for it.

Also, the 4GB card was only slightly more than the 2GB card and I figured it would help with WD, no such luck tho.

Yeah Ubisoft just can't optimize a PC game for shit. Don't blame your card. 

[TAK]

Yeah Ubisoft just can't optimize a PC game for shit. Don't blame your card. 

 

Oh trust me, I don't blame the card at all. I've done my research and seen the performance in other games @ultra/highest settings.

 

Other fun facts about the game with this card:

 

@Ultra

Temp: 75C fans @ 55-60%

vram usage: 3.3GB

FPS about 45-55, except when driving when it drops by at least 10, I even saw a fucking 14 at one point.

 

@High

Temp: 70C fans @ 40%

vram usage: 3.3GB

FPS about 50-65, except when driving when it drops again, this time the drop is even worse, to around 35-45 FPS, but the lowest I saw was 21.

 

Now this is in no way scientific and I was just randomly running around and the switching to lower settings, but I can confirm that the game is not optimized in any way shape or form and I'd say the patch just made this worse. Like I said previously there was hardly any FPS drop that I noticed @ultra pre-patch and no crashes. Since patch, well, see the above results and the game has crashed 5-7 times totally randomly, regardless of session playtime.

 

EDIT:

Also, one random fucking console rant:

Why in the blue fuck do I have to "press any key" to load the fucking main menu, can't you just fucking go there directly? Jesus fuck, I shouldn't get angry about shit like this, but what in the actual fuck is the use of that?

[Meridean]

i got way better performance out of changing it to realtime priority,  i used process lasso to force it to always start in realtime.

[gundershot]

i got way better performance out of changing it to realtime priority,  i used process lasso to force it to always start in realtime.

Don't set games to realtime priority, it can make your system unstable. Set it to high instead.