Watch Dogs - any first impressions?

[whitestar]

As someone who is probably going to purchase a GSYNC monitor I would be very interested in hearing about your experiences with this title. I have read a lot of negative feedback regarding stuttering (without GSYNC).

[fenderjaguar]

That's a different kind of stuttering. Engine related stuttering can't be cured with G-sync, infact it can often be made worse than vsync (vsync when you're not dropping under the refresh, I mean), since g-sync has less latency, and therefore less or no buffered frames to hand to you when the engine effectively pauses.

GTA IV, for example, runs very smooth capped at 40 fps with RSS, with 1/3 refresh rate vsync on 120hz (As long as you never drop under that target frame rate). With G-sync and a frame rate cap, it's pretty stuttery, but not serious stuttering like when you just run it uncapped. I have tried WD out, and it's quite similar.

[whitespider]

Watch dogs will run silky smooth on gsync if you manage to eliminate stuttering in the base game without gsync. So if you lower the settings enough to never get stutter. Then gsync will smooth out the frames perfectly. The same is true for GTA IV. If you pull all of those draw distances right back, then gsync will smooth out the frames wonderfully. The reason for this is because gsync only solves the microstutter, and when the game 'pauses' for a noticeable moment during play, that's not microstutter. That's stutter.

And that kind of stutter is often linked streaming of assets between the cpu and ram and gpu ram, usually the optimization and data of a game sends things in chunks designed around 30fps. Which is the console target framrate. They could increase the amount of data that's sent, however that would require engine rewriting. If the game was designed for 60fps on the console original platform, i guarantee that the stuttering would barely be there. Unfortunately things like the ps4 are not going to help us in that respect, because the ps4 actually has direct access to use it's system ram as vram. Whereas nvidia and amd are not 'there' yet. So it's likely that ps4 games when ported to pc, will stutter more. Because of this.

In the end, console developers do only what they have to, to bring a game to the pc. If something is too hard, they won't spent a great deal of time fixing it. And they certainly won't re-write parts of the engine code.

[fenderjaguar]

The same is true for GTA IV. If you pull all of those draw distances right back, then gsync will smooth out the frames wonderfully.

It really doesn't though. For that game to be smooth, it not only needs capping at a frame rate that's never dropped under, it needs to be sitting behind a frame buffer as well

[RealNC]

Nothing you can do, really. GTAIV was sort of the "king of bad PC ports". It seems it now got dethroned by Watch Dogs.

Unfortunately we're going to be seeing much more where that came from, since developers are now starting to release information that bad framerates do not affect sales (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXJh9ut2hrc). I'm worried that PC gaming will move towards 30FPS in order to mask stuttering issues. Since Watch Dogs is Ubisoft's best selling game on release ever, even with all the framerate problems, I see no reason why they should work on it for future games. They might as well just cap everything to 30FPS and call it a day; they'll be making the same amount of money regardless.

[whitespider]

That's not entirely true. Games that have literal 30fps caps are often massively hated on. Watch dogs ran at that at maximum settings, but the fact that it was the actual performance holding the title back made it forgivable to a higher extent. Plus, optimization issues aside, it's probably the best looking modern open world game there is. For example, if some unreal 3 engine game came out, we all know that that engine tends to render everything at super high framerates, so a 30fps cap would be insulting. However in the case of assassins creed black flag, the latest splinter cell, and watchdogs, they are forgiven because they 'technically' run above 30, and ubisoft-being-dicks aside, they look really modern. And suppport high end features.

Gta iv is a terribly optimized port, however once you drop all the view distances to 1 or 2, things popping up right in front of you. The stuttering is significantly less. And you are pulling 60-140fps. And funnily enough the draw distance of gta iv on it's lowest slider, is still further than a lot of UE3 engine games with open worlds. As terrible as gta iv runs, it actually does have a rather insane draw distance at anything above medium.

[whitestar]

Maybe someone could take the initiative to compile a list of games that GSYNC works well for? Or just list all games and rate them with GSYNC as Bad, Adequate, Good, Excellent? Would be very useful for someone like me, who is still on the fence.

[fenderjaguar]

Gta iv is a terribly optimized port, however once you drop all the view distances to 1 or 2, things popping up right in front of you. The stuttering is significantly less. And you are pulling 60-140fps. And funnily enough the draw distance of gta iv on it's lowest slider, is still further than a lot of UE3 engine games with open worlds. As terrible as gta iv runs, it actually does have a rather insane draw distance at anything above medium.

Yeah, I know what you mean. If you max out the view and detail sliders, the game be quite stuttery if you're uncapped etc. Especially since the CPU is the limiting factor to the frame rate, which can make things more stuttery than if it was the GPU. But if you cap at 30 fps and run 1/4 refresh standard vsync on 120hz from nvidia inspector, it would never drop under that frame rate and be smooth on a fast i5 or i7.

I actually found that the engine really isn't designed to be going over about 25 view/30 detail anyway, since lights flicker at night sometimes when you have it above that. So I never go above those settings. But everything else can be maxed.

[fenderjaguar]

you know, I've actually been playing GTA IV today, and it running quite well with g-sync, even at variable frame rate, even maxed on the sliders. I think I must've been running it first time on g-sync with windows 8.1, now I'm using windows 7. It might just be me, but windows 7 seems to have smoother frame rates, but 8.1 feels to have less input lag...

[whitespider]

Maybe someone could take the initiative to compile a list of games that GSYNC works well for? Or just list all games and rate them with GSYNC as Bad, Adequate, Good, Excellent? Would be very useful for someone like me, who is still on the fence.

I think that's a brilliant idea. I would normally be the person to do this however I don't own a gsync panel. I hope someone else as critical as me (or more!) manages to do this.