Watch Dogs Legion PC Review: Ray Tracing + GFX Upgrades - A Taste of Next-Gen? | DF

OryxTheBakinKing · Nov 1, 2020

What's frustrating about playing it on the One X is there are moments where the game looks next-gen even without ray-tracing.

Feels like a combination of weather effects, NPC density, and 4K textures but idk.

Nooblet · Nov 1, 2020

Soviet said:
That might be true, but Legion has a very good and convincing reflections without RT and doing reflections with RT seems like a waste of opportunity. I want path tracing or at least shadows - just doing reflections is a waste of time with current GI technology.

You won't get full path tracing in a modern game with modern graphics, we're like a decade or more away from that.

Considering Legion does what is equivalent of HFTS for shadows, the benefit from RT shadows would be minimal. And regarding RT reflections being a waste because raster shadows in legion are good enough...did we watch the same video?

mario_O · Nov 1, 2020

The city really comes to life with ray tracing. It's very convincing when looking at the right angles. But the character models, faces, and animations are still very last gen. They look jarring in contrast with the super realistic city.

Deleted member 79451 · Nov 1, 2020

Soviet said:
That might be true, but Legion has a very good and convincing reflections without RT[...]

Are you just talking about the SSR reflections that are only put on ground surfaces? Because all those shop windows and shiny details makes the lack of RT sorely apparent when it's disabled. It's not just unconvincing but very distracting.

Secretofmateria · Nov 1, 2020

marzoo said:
I have to say im quite disappointed visually compared to watch dogs 2 and san francisco.

wd legion has no phone and walking around with music and barely any interiors compared to wd2. i can't explain it but san francisco looked and felt better to play in

watchdogs 2 sales didnt light the world on fire, i can only imagine that legions budget may have been smaller due to this and those things (more licensed music and more interiors) were cut to save costs

dex3108 · Nov 1, 2020

MajesticSoup said:
How does this bode for the future of the 3080. 10gb good enough for the rest of the gen?

That is reserved memory and not real usage. Unfortunately due to anti-cheat Ubisoft uses we can't get real VRAM usage. And we have yet to see how real next-gen games will behave with VRAM (especially with Direct Storage implementation). But i still think that 10GB is bare minimum for 4K.

Dennis8K · Nov 1, 2020

The first few seconds of the video look good enough for me to want the game.

Flappy Pannus · Nov 1, 2020

Soviet said:
That might be true, but Legion has a very good and convincing reflections without RT

In static shots. In actual gameplay they disappear when you move the camera view. Reflections in the real world do not disappear because I'm not looking at the object something is reflecting.

and doing reflections with RT seems like a waste of opportunity. I want path tracing or at least shadows - just doing reflections is a waste of time with current GI technology.

As others have stated, reflections are a part of lighting - and doing path tracing instead of 'just' reflections turns the argument that 'it's too costly' on its head, I mean Quake2 barely goes over 60fps at 1080p on a 2080TI for pete's sake.

Jedi2016 · Nov 1, 2020

Flappy Pannus said:
As others have stated, reflections are a part of lighting - and doing path tracing instead of 'just' reflections turns the argument that 'it's too costly' on its head, I mean Quake2 barely goes over 60fps at 1080p on a 2080TI for pete's sake.

Agreed. Path tracing is ludicrously expensive. That's why the only games that support it are Minecraft and Quake II. Trying to do it on something like WDL would result in seconds-per-frame, not frames-per-second.

Pharaoh · Nov 1, 2020

RT looks impressive, the rest is super meh.

Deleted member 44371 · Nov 1, 2020

dex3108 said:
That is reserved memory and not real usage. Unfortunately due to anti-cheat Ubisoft uses we can't get real VRAM usage. And we have yet to see how real next-gen games will behave with VRAM (especially with Direct Storage implementation). But i still think that 10GB is bare minimum for 4K.

How do you know its reserved and not real? Real usage could be true with high res textures.

Nooblet · Nov 1, 2020

One thing I'm impressed by is the density of the environment, it's on the same level as Division 1/2 but on a larger scale. The other thing that impressed me is that NPCs interact with the environments a lot, they are able to bump into stuff and move and break them to a degree I've not seen in other open world games.

Legion does look like it had a smaller budget than WD2, they did a decent job imo considering that.

dex3108 · Nov 1, 2020

marzoo said:
How do you know its reserved and not real? Real usage could be true with high res textures.

Because it isn't, Afterbutner reports reserved memory unless you set it up to report actual memory used by app. And you can't enable that for Ubisoft games because of their anti-cheat software.

Nooblet · Nov 1, 2020

marzoo said:
How do you know its reserved and not real? Real usage could be true with high res textures.

Because there's basically no game that shows you real memory usage, it's always reserved memory. If you want to find out for sure without having to use third party software like Special K then the way to do it would be to go over the memory bar in the in-game meter and see if you get hiccups, if you don't then you know for sure that it's not using as much VRAM as stated and only reserving it. Because if it actually used more VRAM than you have then you'd have stutters everywhere.

If you do 4K Native/Ultra/RT on a 3080 it'll show you that it's using "almost the whole 10GB" eventhough in this picture here below on a 3090 it says it's using something like 11040MB. https://i.imgur.com/zUQLhUT.png

The other thing being how almost all these games have people come in and say that the memory bar is "just near the limit" but it's never really over the limit, unless you try to force some ridiculously high resolution like beyond 4K.

Nintendo · Nov 1, 2020

Nooblet said:
One thing I'm impressed by is the density of the environment, it's on the same level as Division 1/2 but on a larger scale. The other thing that impressed me is that NPCs interact with the environments a lot, they are able to bump into stuff and move and break them to a degree I've not seen in other open world games.

Legion does look like it had a smaller budget than WD2, they did a decent job imo considering that.

Why do you think it had a smaller budget? Or was it confirmed/rumored? I think they poured a big chunk of the budget on the NPC system because it's insanely impressive.

Snake Eater · Nov 1, 2020

emmastone said:
Raytracing 1 GIF | Gfycat

Watch and share Raytracing GIFs on Gfycat

gfycat.com

I thought this was a great example of RT. Check it out, it's stunning.

yeah that's amazing, don't see how anyone could argue against that

Wein Cruz · Nov 1, 2020

emmastone said:
Raytracing 1 GIF | Gfycat

Watch and share Raytracing GIFs on Gfycat

gfycat.com

I thought this was a great example of RT. Check it out, it's stunning.

I can't take anyone seriously if they look at this and still try to say RT isn't impressive.

Deleted member 81119 · Nov 1, 2020

I'm sure it depends on the game. Like I'm not sure I care about Ray Tracing on something like the Witcher, but Gran Turismo or Horizon? Yes please!

Jedi2016 · Nov 1, 2020

I want to go find that Blume building just to do that.

chrominance · Nov 1, 2020

Dumb question: any reason why DLSS settings aren't discussed in the optimization suggestions (unless I missed them like an idiot)? I've been playing around a bit with them but it's hard to discern much of a difference, either in performance or in visual quality, at 1440p in the open world.

Interesting that the optimized settings knock a few things down even further than I had them, so I guess that's a good sign for me trying to lock 1440/60 on a 3080.

Nooblet · Nov 1, 2020

MajesticSoup said:
How does this bode for the future of the 3080. 10gb good enough for the rest of the gen?

marzoo said:
How do you know its reserved and not real? Real usage could be true with high res textures.

So in that picture it says 4K native/RT ON/Ultra textures is using 11040MB on an RTX 3090 yea?

Now look here, I used an RTX3080 at 4K Native/Ultra settings/Ultra Textures/RT Ultra. And took these picture while it's raining, so RT is in full effect. Ofcourse it's unplayable as it dips quite often below 30 quite often while driving and intense scenes (and there seem to.be some bugs, but those are more on the GPU power and optimisation than VRAM). What needs to be noted is the VRAM usage on top right corner and see how it is now magically under 10GB. And what's funny is that the ingame meter doesn't even cross 9GB now.

Nooblet · Nov 1, 2020

chrominance said:
Dumb question: any reason why DLSS settings aren't discussed in the optimization suggestions (unless I missed them like an idiot)? I've been playing around a bit with them but it's hard to discern much of a difference, either in performance or in visual quality, at 1440p in the open world.

Interesting that the optimized settings knock a few things down even further than I had them, so I guess that's a good sign for me trying to lock 1440/60 on a 3080.

The more performance based you go the more motion artifacts you get on thin surfaces. Except for ultra performance which is just total crap and has artifacts everywhere.

DLSS does get you performance improvements which you can see by looking at your GPU usage which goes down between each setting, but the whole reason the usage goes down rather than staying at 90+% and increasing your frame rate instead is because you are being CPU limited. As such DLSS doesn't translate into extra frames but rather your GPU ends up idling as it now has to wait for your CPU. And that is the crux of the argument here that most people will just be CPU limited in this game and as such not see performance improvement from DLSS, unless they are pushing high resolution like 4K where you end up being GPU bound.

chrominance · Nov 1, 2020

Nooblet said:
The more performance based you go the more motion artifacts you get on thin surfaces. Except for ultra performance which is just total crap and has artifacts everywhere.

DLSS does get you performance improvements which you can see by looking at your GPU usage which goes down between each setting, but the whole reason the usage goes down rather than staying at 90+% and increasing your frame rate instead is because you are being CPU limited. As such DLSS doesn't translate into extra frames but rather your GPU ends up idling as it now has to wait for your CPU. And that is the crux of the argument here that most people will just be CPU limited in this game and as such not see performance improvement from DLSS, unless they are pushing high resolution like 4K where you end up being GPU bound.

Got it, that makes sense. Weird that my CPU still isn't close to 100% usage but that could just be weird/lack of optimization or other quirks. So I guess I might as well stick with DLSS Quality. Thanks!

Lukas Taves · Nov 1, 2020

Wow even without raytracing this looks really good in this video.

The raytracing reflections are just the icing. And it blew my mind how extensively they are using it, even with the optimizations.

Loanshark · Nov 1, 2020

damn, amazing looking water in this game.

Rodney McKay · Nov 1, 2020

Haha, I was happy to see my CPU (the i5-8400) still used for some of the benchmarks, even if it was the minimum to get ~60fps.

Sadly I don't have a DLSS compatible GPU (still rocking a vanilla 1070), so I can't get any benefits from that. Hoping I can still squeeze a few extra years out of my setup before I need a new GPU at least.

Not having a 4K TV or monitor helps, as does not caring about over 60 frame rates and being OK with occasional drops here and there.
I'll probably be fine until third-party games really go all in on the new generation.

RayCharlizard · Nov 1, 2020

I'm kind of surprised at people saying the visuals are disappointing in this game. I think this might be a situation of art vs. graphics and maybe people just like the look of San Francisco in Watch Dogs 2 more than London in Legion. Watching the Patreon quality video at 4K on my TV I was definitely wowed.

chilleverest · Nov 1, 2020

Why is it mentioned that ''fans had semi-unrealistic expectation for WD1'' ? Wasnt it ubisofts who over-promised in their first WD gameplay showcase ?

RCSI · Nov 1, 2020

dex3108 said:
That is reserved memory and not real usage. Unfortunately due to anti-cheat Ubisoft uses we can't get real VRAM usage. And we have yet to see how real next-gen games will behave with VRAM (especially with Direct Storage implementation). But i still think that 10GB is bare minimum for 4K.

It's easy to disable the anti-cheat, though whether the memory reporting is accurate is another question. Using a 3080. 2160p Native/RT Ultra/Ultra settings

Dictator · Nov 2, 2020

chilleverest said:
Why is it mentioned that ''fans had semi-unrealistic expectation for WD1'' ? Wasnt it ubisofts who over-promised in their first WD gameplay showcase ?

Semi unrealistisch expectations regarding reflections, not the entire graphics package.

KainXVIII · Nov 2, 2020

So i guess no more mid(low?)end benchmarks in DF analyses, like 1060 cards? 😥

Micerider · Nov 2, 2020

KainXVIII said:
So i guess no more mid(low?)end benchmarks in DF analyses, like 1060 cards? 😥

Well, it's a 4 years old card. Would be cool if they can include it, but I understand why they don't anymore.

Deleted member 70824 · Nov 2, 2020

Ray tracing looks real nice in this video. There is one slight problem though: the more real the game looks, the more the animation flaws show up.

KainXVIII · Nov 2, 2020

Micerider said:
Well, it's a 4 years old card. Would be cool if they can include it, but I understand why they don't anymore.

Xb1/PS4 are 7 years old, but DF still cover them 😅 And gtx1060 was most popular videocard according Steam hardware survey last time i checked.

Micerider · Nov 2, 2020

KainXVIII said:
Xb1/PS4 are 7 years old, but DF still cover them 😅 And gtx1060 was most popular videocard according Steam hardware survey last time i checked.

Makes sense, but consoles are fixed hardware that do not move during a gen (or with just 1 variant). They can't take the same on PC otherwise they'd still have to cover GTX 760 and 970 etc...

But I agree otherwise, including the GPU that is the most in-use currently would be a good practice (nudge to DF people here ;) )

Classy Tomato · Nov 2, 2020

KainXVIII said:
So i guess no more mid(low?)end benchmarks in DF analyses, like 1060 cards? 😥

If you just want to get an idea about how the card performs, you can search for some benchmark videos on YouTube. For some reason, even there are some people benchmarking my card, a 750Ti, which runs terribly in the game lol

Dictator · Nov 2, 2020

KainXVIII said:
So i guess no more mid(low?)end benchmarks in DF analyses, like 1060 cards? 😥

I am phasing them out of my work and will not be covering them anymore really. They are old - game devs will not be targeting them soon and we upgrade our midrange as well.
The interesting point of comparison for DF is no longer how 1060 and 580 compare against consoles, rather their successors against consoles.
Like I said - I covered 580 and 1060 for about 2,5 years... their time has come to be succeeded.

Lom1lo · Nov 2, 2020

Do we already know what rtx settings the series x version has (based on the trailer)

jett · Nov 2, 2020

SecondNature said:
Ray tracing is neat, but I feel disappointed with how dead these worlds look. Like the AI and NPC animations/activities just look so dated. To me, that's a real wow factor that I suppose we wont see for another gen or two

Something about these Watch Dogs games just look deeply unappealing to me, visually. It's just dull I guess.

liquidmetal14 · Nov 2, 2020

I get how some people just like to be critical and not even half-handed and some kind of positive remark but I do feel like just watching that video we are getting finally what they revealed in the original watch dogs Target video. It probably looks a little bit better than that as well which I guess you could say is a compliment considering people have to remember that these effects are very taxing.

But even looking at the low resolution Ray tracing in spider-man, it's already really impressive. I kind of hearken into vr in which it doesn't necessarily mean the highest end experience just as long as the immersion works. I think people need to really temper their expectations or come down to a realistic viewpoint on how these graphics are going to work. Games already look really amazing and if they're just going to run at higher resolutions and higher frames on top of all these little fancy advancements with HDMI 2.1 like features, I think it's time to start appreciating effects that are adding to what's already there in order to enhance the realism or believability of the visual.

I don't even know why I should have to say this because I feel like this is very common sense but maybe it's because we have a range of people here some of which are either younger or maybe less experienced with graphical and generational transitions but I feel like it's necessary to State the most obvious things to bring people back to some kind of realistic point of view instead of just constantly trying to criticize something. I'll be the first to agree with anybody on some aspects or performance issues which those are more egregious but when you have open world or any other types of games whether they're corridor based or open, and they're doing all these fancy or new effects on top of bridges that are probably not necessarily that much more intense on the hardware yet we are seeing some great and new amazing techniques which further enhance a groundwork which we've already had so in turn you get some amazing looking reflections and all sorts of other Ray traced benefits.

I think instead of trying to downplay what Ray tracing is as some sort of gimmick I think people need to realize how much of a paradigm shift we are reaching right now in real time graphics. I'm old enough to remember visuals from Hollywood movies that we are exceeding now. The toy story analogy has always been something of a threshold to meet and there are games coming out with that particular art style that are bringing us to that level and then some. Folks just need to get on board and enjoy the ride and make some compromises on pc. Consoles are going to be optimized and you're going to be fine there so don't be afraid of your thirty frame or 60 frames per second experience . Be more happy that we are getting high resolutions with higher frames and so much fancy new effects.

And as far as Gump would say, "that's all I have to say about that".

KainXVIII · Nov 2, 2020

Dictator said:
I am phasing them out of my work and will not be covering them anymore really. They are old - game devs will not be targeting them soon and we upgrade our midrange as well.
The interesting point of comparison for DF is no longer how 1060 and 580 compare against consoles, rather their successors against consoles.
Like I said - I covered 580 and 1060 for about 2,5 years... their time has come to be succeeded.

Damn, time to switch to LowSpecGamer channel /jk
But i understand your position 😅
Still, there are no successors to gtx970/1060 cards announced or i'm wrong?

sweetmini · Nov 2, 2020

KainXVIII said:
Still, there are no successors to gtx970/1060 cards announced or i'm wrong?

Nope, not yet. There is a rumored 3060 "ti" though (same die as 3070, 4864 cores instead of 5888 for the 3070, clocked 60MHz slower than 3070, same memory and bus as 3070, 16.2TFlops, less than $399) , still no official announcement about it, it is supposed to be postponed to december 2nd.

by the way Dictator , this series of yours is much appreciated.

Beer Monkey · Nov 2, 2020

There's a brand new ray tracing benchmark in 3DMark. The interactive mode is very cool especially the depth of field features.

Nooblet · Nov 2, 2020

Landy828 · Nov 2, 2020

The Ultra RT reflections look great.

It's really cool seeing everything reflected in things like a trashcan or a railing. Really makes scenes feel more alive across the board.

Landy828 · Nov 2, 2020

Nooblet said:

Series X is a BEAST. Good stuff.

Double post 🤦‍♂️

DanielG123 · Nov 2, 2020

Nooblet said:

Holy shit, the Series X is a beast!

Matzpxl · Nov 2, 2020

It amazes me how awful the DX12 performance is. My 2060S/R5 3600 can't keep a 60fps stable with RT medium and DLSS performance at 1080p. lol

ShapeDePapa · Nov 2, 2020

Nooblet said:

Really good comparison! The reflections resolution isn't as high as those on PC but it's still really good!

Pancracio17 · Nov 2, 2020

Nooblet said:

I barely noticed any difference, outside of the lower framerate on Xbox of course. Bodes well for next gen.

Watch Dogs Legion PC Review: Ray Tracing + GFX Upgrades - A Taste of Next-Gen? | DF

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