As most of you would expect, Ubisoft did not provide us with a review code for Watch_Dogs (which explains why our Performance Analysis article has been slightly delayed). Therefore, we decided to purchase Ubisoft’s title as we’re pretty sure that all of our readers are interested in it.
While our article is not ready yet, we can confirm that the 6GB RAM minimum requirement is not valid at all. Watch_Dogs is fully playable on systems with 4GB RAM as it does not use more than 2GB.
As we can see, we never hit our 4GB limit despite Ubisoft’s claims that the game requires at least 6GB of RAM. On our test system, Watch_Dogs used only 2GB (and that was at 1080p with High settings). Unfortunately, we could not run the game at mixed Ultra/High settings due to VRAM issues that caused major stuttering, but that’s something we’ll cover in our Performance Analysis. Moreover, we can confirm that there are no memory leaks as the following shots were captured after playing the game for over an hour.
Hopefully, our Performance Analysis article will go live tomorrow. We’ll have one article for low-end systems, and one for high-end (that will be published at a later date and will be based on our new test system).
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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I think that deponds on how much memory the graphic card has as the vram usage are crazy high.
It needs 3GB Vram to run good or as good as this mess can run for now. If you have say 1gb vram then you surely would need much system ram I belive!
This article is about the system RAM, not the video RAM ;). VRAM requirements are also ‘fake’ as Ubisoft recommended 2GB of VRAM (when in fact you need more than 4GB of VRAM or even 6GB if you want to have TXAA plus Ultra textures)
Even on high texture 2gb ram is not enough…
Whatttt!? GTFO. That is wild. Man, this is depressing lol. Here I am thinking I was going to be alright with my EVGA GTX 770 SC 2 GB ha! 🙁
Bad optimization or not, I now have a better idea what kind of upgrade(s) I will be making in the next year or so, just in case to be on the safe side.
Was about to do the same and right now I hear that even on a GTX 780 with 3gb it ain enough. Really crazy huh!
So WTF should I do, I mean I cant game on my ancient gtx 570 anymore and now we see that the vram requirements are getting crazy high. Where the f*ck is the gtx 8…. series. Next year it seem heh.
You can always get an AMD card as they aren’t so stingy with their Vram. Then there’s also the 4Gb 770s if you want nVidia.
Thanks but I will never get an AMD card but I have been eyeing the 770 4GB but some say it cant use all 4gb vram as the 256 bit bus is to small.
But if i can use em all I will get a GTX 770 so whats the deal, have you heard bout it ?
Have a nice day bro and thanks for the suggestions 🙂
I have just one 770 and it is 2 gb vram version. I have read conflicting reports on the memory bus not being able to utilize all of the 4 gb vram. I would love to hear more myself from those with hands on experience.
My little bro was thinking about going sli gtx 770 4 gb models. I think I might either sell my 770 down the road towards a Maxwell series card or I will save it as a dedicated physX card! lol.
That would be pretty beast,having a 770 sc as a physX card,although the only game in the near future that I can think of that would prob. need something like that is The Witcher 3. I cannot wait for that game.
I still think Witcher 3 will be a lot better optimized than Watch dogs.
Exactly people says different things about it. Theres a good thread over at nvidia 3 forum about it, take a look over there.
I have decided to get a gtx 780 and hope that the 3gb will be enough as I want more power then the 770 have and when I get a Maxwell I will use the gtx 780 as a physx card as maybe we will need it for the whitcher 3 as you says 🙂
Thanks. I’ll take a look at that thread.
My best friend has a gtx 780 ti and he likes it a lot. I think you will do just fine with that card. IMO I think Watch Dogs will hopefully be just a bad example of PC porting when it comes to the vram issues.
Otherwise, I am gonna be screwed along with anyone else who only has 2 gb of VRAM. I am not in a position to upgrade yet so I will have to make do untiul sometime early next year.
I imagine Witcher 3 is going to have some heavy physX with Nvidia hairworks. That fur tech looks amazing. 🙂
Yeah I think that would be fine and those card seems to be great overclokers to 🙂
Exactly we can just hope that it’s the game thats crappy done and if we take a look at say, Metro Last Light with those crazy textures and it dont use much vram at all. I think that it’s just Ubi doing a crappy job so you/me should be just fine until Maxwell drops in next year.
I think thats why the delayed the Witcher couse nvidias Maxwell beying push back to next year, no card in existense can run it good 😀
Yeah I know, was just saying that if you have little vram you would need more system memory or atleast thats what I thougt 🙂
Yeah it’s a crazy vram hog this game.
I have a gtx660 3GB ,run the game at 1680×1050 -ultra presets and deferredfxquality pc with fxaa ,no vsync ,1 single buffered frame and get 47 constant fps.
i5 3470 – 2x4GB ram DDR3 1333.
Good to see…yet need to see how it uses the CPU cores and the vRAM in mid settings. I want to try if it runs on my system.
Did anyone actually think this was going to be a well optimized Ubisoft PC port?
No but hoped for at least a playable version.
I was
really excited for this game and brought it today. Installed it and
played form for few minutes and then I realize how Shit game reallt is.
Requirement are Sky-high,
Badly Optimized,
Graphic looks crap and
Even in low setting it can’t even run smooth!
Just WTF? With the Spec I got I should be albe to play this game in Medium setting.
Really Disappointing
This is what mine shows when running Watch Dogs.
http://i59.tinypic.com/essoyc.png
What’s your RAM usage before running the game? Also check how much memory Watch_Dogs consumes at the ‘Processes’ tab
My RAM usage at Maximum Everything is over 5Gb as well so that 6Gb requirement is true. Before running the game it is around 2.5Gb.
909MB total usage with nothing open.
My system is running i7 920 OC@4.1ghz, 6gb DDR3, GTX 780 SC OC to 1.2, I can play game on ultra setting, texture on ‘high’, FXAA 2X and all that around 50-70fps on 1080p, but as soon I change texture to ultra omg forget it stuttering / lag / gpu usage drops to 0% for few second..ugh so bad..and game is using 2.8gb vram on ‘high’ setting with everything else set to ultra
I have a titan black, and unless you change textures to medium it stutters quite badly during driving. This is not a vram issue. I have tried virtually all combinations of settings. This is a badly optimised game that needs to be sorted…
Do note that Shadows and Reflections on Ultra bring additional VRAM usage. Anti-aliasing also brings additional VRAM usage.
At 1080p with High settings and no AA we did not experience any stuttering at all on our GTX690. Increasing Shadows or Reflections to Ultra caused stuttering issues.
The best performance/quality setting I have found are high textures, temporal smaa, and high preset with hbao+. This results in a good balance, though it still does have a tendency to stutter while driving every now and then. But for a totally smooth experience, you can have everything else at ultra (except aa) and you have to lower textures to medium. Do you agree that my system 4770k @4.2 and titan black sc should be able to run this? I don’t think it is a vram issue personally, as I have seen posts from 780 ti users that experience the same problems/solutions as me… On the best performance/quality settings I stated the game doesn’t look much better than ps4 (just 60fps, better ao, and better resolution) and this doesn’t sound like its properly optimised at all consider my gpu is 3x more powerful than the one in the ps4…
I was having problems with stutter until I done the following..
add “-disablepagefilecheck” THEN use borderless window.
Try it as it worked ok for me?
Tried that. Sadly didn’t make any difference. I have given up with the settings and fixes for the moment. I just run it on Ultra and put up with the driving stutter. Its fine on foot, near perfect…
See I too had problems with stutter while using my HD 7990 so much so that I dropped settings and resolution. yet once I done the above I have raise the settings again and not noticed the stuttering?
Good one 😉 we all have same problem. Textures on 2GB and is OK i have 60fps average on 7970Ghz
common guys the high end article first…
Yes maybe playable with sli titan z
How do you get the depth of field like in the screenshot above? seen alot of screenshots out there with the retail version with DOF?
BTW im sure that ubi didn’t provide you guys a reviewer code because you showed the true ,the game has been masivelly downgraded.
Keep it up John ,you’re doing great.
I was
really excited for this game and brought it today. Installed it and
played form for few minutes and then I realize how Shit game reallt is.
Requirement are Sky-high,
Badly Optimized,
Graphic looks crap and
Even in low setting it can’t even run smooth!
Just WTF? With the Spec I got I should be able to play this game in Medium setting.
Really Disappointing
ok then ill get the jack sparrow version. Am sorry ubicrap but having 5 diffirent collector editions, tons of dlcs, bad porting and high requirments just doesnt worth my money. Ill try it if i like it ill buy it when its cheap if not, i wont bother.
You never need more than 6 gb of RAM on your PC today if you use it for gaming. Have had 6 GB of RAM for years now and still no problems