Watch Dogs: Legion Nvidia Performance Analysis

Improving Performance

Improving performance in this game is remarkably easy really, as it has such a huge range of graphics settings to play around with. Actually, for many users, it likely has too many and can be a bit confusing. For the quickest way to improve frame rates, lower the resolution. However, if you’re firm on what pixel count you want you can lower any of the following, as they all have a drastic impact on performance. However, lower them a little bit at a time until you’re happy with the performance. Disable DoF and motion blur too while you’re at it, it’ll improve the visuals and saves you some performance too.

• Environment
• Texture Resolution (If VRAM is limited.)
• Texture Filtering
• Reflections
• Shadows

Everything Else

Keep the game on DirectX 12, it seems to work just fine on that mode. Geometry. Set your texture resolution as high as it can be based on your VRAM limit, and filtering to high if you can. Set shadows and reflections to very high, as it’ll look incredible. However, set headlight shadows to Your Car Only if performance is lacking.

Post-processing, TAA works really well, but use FXAA at higher resolutions as it tends to look a little clearer. That being said, at 4K you could really just turn them all off and improve performance, but the impact of FXAA is quite small on high-end hardware.

Finally, Temporal Upscaling is your last-ditch effort to improve performance. It’s going to give you the biggest performance gains, but at the cost of rendering resolution. So you can set the game to 4K, then set it to output at say, 80%. This would set the internal resolution to 1728p, but still output to a 2160p frame, giving you a big performance boost. It’s worth playing with, even just dropping to 90% and bump on a little image sharpening can net impressive games without actually lowering quality settings like reflections and shadows.

Benchmarking

The latest game from Ubisoft shows that they’ve really been listening to the industry. The staggering range of control over the visuals means that you should be able to squeeze a lot of extra performance from any card at any resolution. That being said, there are so many high-end processes here, that cranking to ultra will bring even the best hardware to its knees. This game is going to be a tough GPU benchmark for quite some time. On that note, the built-in benchmark tool is excellent. Not only does it gives you the frame rate scores, but also a breakdown of what was and wasn’t demanding on your system. This way, if you are having performance issues you can see what may be causing them.

Look at this run, you can see shadows put a strain on the CPU, and bringing that down to medium could make a big improvement.

There are a lot of settings in this game, but don’t let that put you off. Get stuck into the advanced settings, and pay attention to the key settings we discussed above and what this impact page is telling you after you benchmark.