Watch Dogs launched with some performance issues on PC that cause serious stuttering and lag on some systems. Ubisoft is still working on a patch to iron out those problems. To see how the game performed for us on ultra settings, we threw Watch Dogs at the LPC and recorded some open world driving, hacking, shooting mayhem with Nvidia Shadowplay.
While we normally record our max settings gameplay videos with FRAPS or Dxtory at 1440p, Nvidia Shadowplay recently added support for 1440p recording. We recorded with Shadowplay this time because it's far easier on the framerate than either of the above. It also produces much smaller (but still high quality) video files. Bad news: something went wrong with our Shadowplay settings and we ended up with 1080p footage. Good news: Watch Dogs is still a looker with all of its settings cranked to ultra.
With Shadowplay recording, Watch Dogs' framerate fluctuated from the high 30s to the low 50s on the Large Pixel Collider. We didn't encounter any stuttering issues with Nvidia's latest drivers installed.
Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.
When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).
