Dedsec is back and this time it's in San Francisco. The original Watch Dogs saw one of the rockiest PC releases I can remember, from graphical downgrades to being a less than stellar poster child for NVIDIA's Gameworks. So I could fully understand people's concern when we saw that Watch Dogs 2was getting the Gameworks treatment this time around as well. But, seeing Ubisoft delay the PC version by a couple weeks I felt it a good chance to see just what they've learned over the earlier release. Using a very evolved version of the OPUS engine the developers should have a better grasp on things this go around. But, we're not here to talk about the game itself; the performance is what we're all hear to find out about.

Test System and Methodology.

Testing an open world game like WD2 presents it's own world of problems. Being that it's randomly generated it's impossible to have two exact runs go exactly the same. So what we did, and why it's taken so long to get out, is ran our course 5 times per configuration to level out as much variation as possible. All tests were completed over the two minute course and averaged out after that. To try and keep this as level as possible we used the Ultra Preset for the basic tests and disabled "San Francisco Fog". After the basic graphics card tests we moved into testing CPU Core/Threading Performance to see how the game is affected by CPU structure. Then we took at a very interesting implementation of Temporal Filtering.

X99 Test System