This is a small guide of the many little tweaks you can put in for Watch Dogs on the PC.
This 1st one isn’t specific to Watch Dogs, so feel free to try it on other PC games too. Basically, it’s a way to manage the hardware memory management in the virtual address space, from Large and Small pages. This is a lot to read through to understand in detail, but like I said above, it mainly modifies memory management. You can get the download, instructions and explanation here.
You can tweak your Watch Dogs shortcut to check the page file without using it. Go to your shortcut, right click, and add “-disablepagefilecheck” at the end of the target line. If you have the Steam version you can add it to your launch options too.
We have an XML file to also help modify settings, which happens to be a work in progress. You may want to bookmark the pastebin link here.
Finally, early players seem to be complaining that stuttering is a major issue in the game, and this one little change will take care of that in case Ubisoft doesn’t get to it first. Basically, use borderless windows. Some of you may remember that this fix also worked on The Elder Scrolls Skyrim.
On the side, you may want to avoid going too high on your texture settings compared to your GPU VRAM. If you happen to have a 3 GB VRAM GPU you’re good, but otherwise you’ll want to keep tabs on it.
Here's some tips specific to PCs with Nvidia cards, as culled from the official performance / tweaks guide:
First off, you will want to download and install the GeForce 337.88 WHQL Game ready drivers. These come with a host of perforance boosters on their own, some specific to the game, and also included new and updated SLI profiles, and improvements to 3D vision.
In terms of anti aliasing, low to medium end PCs should run on Temporal SMAA, medium to high end PCs should use MSAA 4x, with post process antialiasing via SMAA or SweetFX, and medium to high end PCs with GeForce GTX 600 and above should use TXAA.
For Level of Detail, High is preferred overall. If your PC isn't powerful enough to run at this setting, tweak each LoD element until it has been optimized for your specific build.
For Reflections, High is preferred overall. The drop from High to Medium translates to a loss of fidelity by as much as five frames. Having said that, of course, this doesn't affect gameplay that much.
For Shader performance, Medium is recommended for most PCs. Set to High if you can for best results, but you should avoid Low if at all possible.
For Shadows, Low is again unacceptable, so you should set it to at least Medium, and higher if possible.
For Textures, High is recommended if your PC can run it. Even at Medium, there are compromises, so it's best to avoid it. Those of you with lower end PCs may notice a small performance boost if you have to go there.
For Water, High is best, and if you can't do that, avoid areas with water as much as possible. Seriously.
Finally, Nvidia has outed the 30 configurable settings you can modify by editing the GamerProfile.xml file that should be found in C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\My Games\Watch_Dogs. You can go through the details from our source here.
Watch Dogs is coming May 27 to Windows, PS3, Xbox 360, PS4, and Xbox One, and on Wii U this fall.
