Watch Dogs: Legion Nvidia Performance Analysis

Optimised

The game seems remarkably well optimised, this came as quite the surprise to me since it seems Ubisoft usually polish their games engines with their hands tied behind their back. However, after the recent Assassin’s Creed launch, which went completely unlike previous Assassin’s Creed launches and seemed largely bug-free, it seems those whacky developers have gone and done it twice and made a quality product. Who knows, the might be onto something here.

Profile Scaling

1080p

1440p

2160p

Using the RTX 2080 as a basis for the scaling test, it seems pretty well balanced, with the 1080p offering 99 FPS at the High profile settings. Increasing to 1440p seems to cost around 25% of your performance, and that scales broadly the same at Very High and Ultra settings.

Moving from 1440p to 4K is more expensive, taking up a further 40% of your FPS. That means performance is pretty much cut in half going from 1080p to 4K. That’s actually pretty impressive, given that you’re rendering four times the resolution, not double, so the game does scale really well.

Ray tracing using the ultra settings was enough to take my RTX 2080, drag it around the back of the barn and blow its brains out. 30 FPS at 1080p Ultra. Sure, the game looked “CINEMATIC AF” but damn, more FPS would be nice. Of course, a faster GPU will help, as would DLSS, but for some damn reason, I couldn’t get that to enable and it remained greyed out. I’ve seen similar users have this issue, and I’ll come back to that at a later date, as DLSS does tend to mature for each game post-release.

You can get closer to 60 easily enough though, just drop back down to High, and you’ll be able to enjoy around 60 FPS at 1080p and 45 FPS at 1440p, which is easily improved that to 60 FPS again by dropping the scaling to about 85% turning on sharpening in Nvidia GeForce Experience; a quick alternative to DLSS that looks pretty great actually!