Watch Dogs PC Performance and Tweaking Guide

Nvidia has released an exhaust tweaking guide to get the best out of Ubisoft's action-adventure hackathon.

Watch Dogs is out today, and if you are a PC gamer, you will be a) hoping and praying that the game will run on your system, and b) surfing the Internet looking for a tweaking guide to get all the extra performance out of the game without taking a visual hit. Thankfully, Nvidia already had the foresight and has released a surprisingly detailed performance and tweaking guide for Ubisoft’s action-adventure hackathon.

Watch Dogs uses Ubisoft’s all-new Disrupt Engine to deliver advanced graphics and special effects and such graphical fidelity comes at a cost. If you are looking to play the game on high and above settings, you will certainly need a beefy PC to take the load.

To ease the pain a little, Nvidia has released a new driver for its GTX cards and has termed it as an “essential upgrade” for Watch Dogs. The drivers includes a “wealth of upgrades and optimizations that boost system performance and improve existing features” such as a 75% bump on DirectX 11 and SLI performance, “new technology that reduces game load times”, and more. Also included are Watch Dogs-specific performance optimizations, and SLI and 3D Vision profiles.

The guide goes into great detail explaining each and every available visual setting in the game, what they do, how they look at various detail levels, and what sort of performance impact you can expect with each one of them. However, more important for PC users will be the config file tweaking, which provides greater control over the minute visual options in the game such as geometry detail, depth of field quality, shading quality, Supersampling, etc. The config file is called GamerProfile.xml and can be found in “C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\My Games\Watch_Dogs”, where “USERNAME” must be replaced with the username of your PC. Do note that making config level changes can potentially negatively affect game performance, so always make a backup of the config file and your saves before attempting to do so.

Finally, Nvidia also provides a handy ‘Watch Dogs Optimal Playable Settings’ guide which lays out the recommended settings for graphics cards GTX 460 and up. Nvidia has aimed for “at least thirty-five frames per second at all times at 1920x1080” with the optimal settings although your mileage may vary depending on the rest of your system specification.