Playing Watch Dogs on PC sounds like its been a bit of a technical minefield, but there is at least one patch on the way. Ubisoft graphics technical director Sebastien Viard has been tweeting away all day about performance of the game on PC and finished up with the news that a patch is in progress.
And finally, our PC progs are also currently working on a patch to improve your experience thanks to your reports, stay tuned 🙂 #WatchDogs
— Sebastien Viard (@SebViard) May 29, 2014
Prior to that, Viard had claimed that the issues on PC stem from a “lack of unified memory.” That was followed by a succession of PC players saying they had graphics cards with an excess of 3GB of VRAM and were still running into serious problems.
Watch Dogs can use 3+ GB of RAM on NG consoles for graphics, your PC GPU needs enough VRAM for ultra options due to the lack of unified mem
— Sebastien Viard (@SebViard) May 29, 2014
In theory, if your graphics card is lacking in the VRAM department, turning down texture quality, AA or resolution should result in a performance boost. However, that doesn’t seem to be working in every case and people are still reporting stuttering and poor frame-rates even when selecting lower quality graphics options.
The question persist about why PCs with far more internal power than the PS4 are unable to run Watch Dogs at the same quality as that platform. VRAM and unified memory differences don’t appear to be telling the whole story.
Despite the myriad problems experienced by PC Watch Dogs players, Sebastien Viard says the team did a “fantastic job” with the PC version.
You can read the IncGamers review of the somewhat underwhelming Watch Dogs, here.