Remember that old Watchdogs E3 bullshot? I think we've finally made it there! But seriously, the third entry to the Watchdogs franchise, Watchdogs Legion, has stepped into the realm of cross-generation status and brought some new shinies but still held back a bit by the old guard systems. That's not to say that Watchdogs legion hasn't taken the Disrupt Engine and made some massive improvements in it.

Ubisoft partnered with NVIDIA on Watchdogs Legion to bring DLSS and DXR reflections to the world of Watchdogs and the payoff was has been quite good. While the DLSS support will only be available on NVIDIA RTX capable graphics cards due to the nature of the requirement for Tensor Core support the DXR support extends beyond and is even available on the Xbox Series X/S and graphics cards that have a DXR supported driver stack.

The world of Watchdogs Legion (specifically London) is quite a dynamic and lively world that is complemented by the use of ray-traced reflections. This extends past perfectly flat mirrorlike surfaces and is even applied to places like marble walls and wet streets. Traditional screen space reflections that the game uses leave the world feeling a bit overly shiny while the use of RT reflections tone things down and only cause the reflections to show naturally. This means that the depth of water in puddles affects the amount of reflection rather than just a blanket 'reflect all in screen space' effect.

Performance is always a question on the table so as we move through here and take a look at the way the game looks through various settings we'll also see how it impacts performance in the game so you have a better idea of what you're stepping into.

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Watch Dogs: Legion Test System

Testing Watchdogs Legion is a rather interesting challenge as the game is an open-world game with a lot of dynamics that change as moments slip by. Cars move, people move in and out, but the biggest is the time of day, and weather cycles are ever moving. This makes it impossible to set a reliable and repeatable in-game benchmark. Thankfully, for better or worse, the game does include a built-in benchmarking utility that makes it easy to measure changes in settings and how they impact performance.

Now it must be pointed out that the built-in benchmark results represent more of what the in-game performance is like when you are on foot, things change a bit when you get behind the wheel. You can expect the game to run a bit less than ideal while hot-rodding it around the streets of London, it's better than when the game first launched after the initial patches, but still not where it needs to be for a seamless experience.

Test System