Watch Dogs GameGPU preview

Release date: May 27, 2014 
Genre: Action-adventure, Action-Stealth, Open world
developer: Ubisoft Montreal, Ubisoft Reflections
Publisher: Ubisoft

You play as Aiden Pearce, a brilliant hacker with a criminal past that led to a violent family tragedy. On the path to justice, the main character can hack any system or device around him. Aiden will have access to ubiquitous CCTV cameras, download personal information to find a target, control traffic lights and public transport to stop the enemy, manipulate public services and police networks will greatly simplify the completion of the mission.

Having released a new trailer for Watch Dogs, Ubisoft was criticized for degrading the picture quality of their new action adventure game. Ubisoft categorically denies players’ attacks on the graphics quality of the final release of the Watch Dogs action game. Indeed, if you compare screenshots from the presentation video presented at E3 in 2012 and the latest trailer, you will notice that the quality of the effects has really dropped. Ubisoft PR Manager Tessa Vilin replied that “this is impossible”: “Guys, I saw the game, it looks amazing. This is a real nextgen, I’m sure.” 

But not everything is as bad as it might seem at first glance; the character models, or rather their faces, are practically no different from those demonstrated earlier.

Unfortunately, the video does not show many elements of physics that were very clearly demonstrated at E3, for example how the wind shakes the leaves on the trees. The environments generally look more realistic in the early cutscenes.

The quality of the explosions was also seriously deteriorated, especially in visual terms; in physical terms, you can also see a lot of debris that scatters after the explosion, but the surrounding objects do not react to the explosion as well as was presented at E3. In the new trailer, the explosions feel less bright and less impressive.

The gaming portal Gamespot recently streamed the PS4 version of Watch Dogs. Below is a comparison between the current version and the 2012 build. Due to the fact that the trailers show different weather and different times of day, it is not possible to accurately assess the lighting, but in the latest build the reflections are identical to the original one.

Now about what’s new in Watch Dogs, firstly Ubisoft has added several new smoke effects to the game, which are undoubtedly much better than those demonstrated previously.

The filter, which automatically turned on during shooting and affected the general lighting, was replaced with a simplified one.

 It’s worth noting that the latest story trailer showed the version for the next generation of consoles (at least that’s what Sony claimed on its official Twitter account). Thus, the image shown in the trailer is what you will see if you buy Watch Dogs for PlayStation 4, Xbox One or PC. Also, it became known about the technical characteristics of the game on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One: 1080p/30fps and 960p/30 fps, respectively. The PC version will run at resolutions up to 4K and optional fps.  

 Watch Dogs will run on Windows Vista (SP2), Windows 7 (SP1), or Windows 8 all 64-bit systems. Other operating systems have not yet been confirmed to be supported by this game.

The priority and main graphics API for Watch Dogs will be DirectX 11. The game will work through the Uplay digital game sales service. 

After the French publisher presented one of its most ambitious projects, Watch Dogs, at E3, it was believed that the game was being developed on an old but modified engine – Anvil Engine (Assasin’s Creed). On February 24, 2013, the game’s technical director wrote on Twitter that the game was being developed on a completely new engine – Disrupt, specially developed for the Ubisoft Montreal department. According to the developers, none of the technologies available at that time (CryEngine or Unreal Engine) met the requirements and were not suitable for creating open-world games.

The main feature of Disrupt Engine is its dynamism. Many real phenomena have been recreated in the city. How people drive cars, the behavior of water, wind, electricity. Everything reacts to all, interacts with each other and you get “branching reactions”. 

Take the rain for example, when the sky becomes gloomy the townspeople take out umbrellas. Lights reflect from a wet surface. You can see how the wind changes the direction of the rain, blowing away debris and leaves. Clothes are also affected, as Aiden puts his hands in his pockets or a gust of wind causes a passerby to tighten his jacket. These are not big, but important details. Heavy traffic or an accident will make citizens nervous, honk their horns, or even leave their cars to find out what’s going on. Random witnesses to incidents can call an ambulance.

Such engine capabilities certainly affect the attractiveness of the city and immersion in its atmosphere. And intervening in the flow of events and looking at the consequences will be interesting for the gameplay. And this is another feature of the engine – your influence on the world. How people around you treat you depends only on your actions. Moreover, according to animation director Colin Graham, the character’s reputation will be somewhat more complex than just “good-evil.” Simply put, if you display weapons on the streets of the city, open fire and cause “mayhem,” people will be more likely to recognize you and call the police. As a result, you can generally become a famous person whose face does not disappear from the news. At the same time, silently killing an ordinary NPC will not add “+1 to the renegade” to you.  

And saving an innocent victim will not bring people’s love if before that you rushed through the city center with a machine gun at the ready. The third important point is that the engine is designed for a constant transition from multiplayer to single player and back, without additional downloads, transitions and other seams. Switching to multiplayer will have absolutely no effect on the world around you. According to the developers, the presence of each player in multiplayer will be invisible. You can only intentionally connect to another player’s “world” in order to track him down. But until a certain moment you won’t know if someone is watching you. From here it becomes clear that in one “world” there can only be two real players – the “hunter” and the “prey”. The one you are hunting will no longer be present in the world of the one who is hunting you. This is how Disrupt Engine protects virtual Chicago from massive online madness.

Plus, the Watch Dogs engine is adaptable for multiple platforms and generations. Of course, this does not mean that the picture on old consoles will be the same in quality as on new ones. We have already talked about the Disrupt Engine settings for different generations of consoles. Also, there are already quite a lot of gameplay demos, so you can see how many moments look in the game.

It is also worth considering that when developing this game, Ubisoft works closely with NVIDIA. First of all, we are talking about support for 4K resolutions, high quality textures, TXAA anti-aliasing and other advantages.

Below we publish the actual gameplay video from the official Watch Dogs website:

Based on the above material, some conclusions can be drawn. The game will apparently be very demanding on video memory resources, and even perhaps the developers may add to the game a check for the availability of system RAM, and let’s say, if you have not 6, but 4 Gigabytes, or even 5, then the game may fail to launch.

Since we should not forget that the Disrupt game engine was developed from scratch specifically for Watch Dogs, it is quite possible that the game should have very good optimization for multi-threading. Therefore, to fully unleash the gaming processor potential, the game will most likely require 8 or more cores.

Well, if we think about the graphics subsystem that will be needed for Watch Dogs, then in our opinion, video cards starting from the level of NVidia GTX 770 or AMD Radeon HD 7970GE can provide sufficient performance. Optimal performance, taking into account all activated maximum settings, can be expected from the NVidia GTX 780 Ti or AMD Radeon R9 290X.