Opting for Temporal SMAA greatly improves framerate in Watch Dogs, often becoming the difference between playable and unplayable lag. It is recommended that high-end hardware utilize MXAA 4x (and high-end nVidia hardware should run on TXAA 4x) do not run MXAA 2x as it will produce sub-par visuals at higher resource cost when matched against Temporal SMAA. The first item to toy with is anti-aliasing, found in the 'display' settings.
Tweaking these settings will greatly impact the playability of the game. Regardless, Watch Dogs still has software-level optimization issues with some of its graphics settings. If stuttering and frame drops are still an issue, try dropping GPU Max Buffered Frames to 1. In our testing with the press version of the driver, we've seen upwards of a 10.5% average FPS improvement with single card configurations.
AMD CrossFire & NVidia Video Lag, Optimal SettingsĪMD's new 14.6 drivers will be available shortly to the public and should be installed immediately when available. Disabling SLI and running single-card may actually yield a better experience (albeit at slightly lower settings) by eliminating microstuttering and tearing issues. Unfortunately, there's still some prevalence of microstuttering in SLI and overall poor performance. NVidia just released 337.88 beta (we wrote about it here), which adds new SLI profiles for Watch Dogs and aims to smooth performance overall.
NVidia SLI Microstuttering, Frame Drops, Low FPSĪs with any video card-related issue, the very first course of action is to download the GPU manufacturer's latest drivers.