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Watch Dogs Graphics and Gameplay: PC Vs. Xbox One, With Surprising Results
MojoKid writes: Normally, the question of whether a game runs better on the PC or a console is a no-brainer, at least for PC users. Watch Dogs, however, with its problematic and taxing PC play, challenges that concept. And since the gap between consoles and PCs is typically smallest at the beginning of the console generation, HotHardware decided to take the Xbox One out for a head-to-head comparison against the PC with this long-awaited title. What was found may surprise you. Depending on just how much horsepower your PC has, the Xbox One (and possibly the PS4 though that wasn't compared) might be the better option. There's no question that the PC can look better, even before you factor in the mods that have been released to date, but unless you've spent $300 or more on a fairly recent GPU, you're not going to be able to run the game at sufficiently high detail to benefit from the enhanced image quality and resolution. If you have a Radeon HD 7950 / R9 280 or an NVIDIA card with greater than 4GB of RAM or a GeForce GTX 780 / 780 Ti, you can happily observe Watch Dogs make hash out of the Xbox One — but statistically, only a minority of gamers have this sort of high-end hardware.
This comparison should be viewed in light of the recent allegations that the PC version's graphics were deliberately handicapped.
......you won't be able to tolerate incompetent VRAM padding and crippling redundancy of a very 2007-looking game.
my rig is BIGGER than yer dick
Because it hangs with any rig less than $400. Put a GTX 660 in this year so I could keep gaming in Win 7 after the forced upgrade from XP.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
but when i watched the videos it made me feel like i was 23 again! ...but only in the sense that the graphics looked like something 2003. i guess i haven't missed much if this is the most hyped game of this generation...wow.
Meanhile, the end result doesn't look THAT much better than the PS3, with its measly GeForce 7900 series.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Why does this work so hard to sound organic, when it seems more like a boldfaced ad for xbox?
This is not new or unique. The PC is full of games that have ridiculously bad console-to-PC ports; With shitty controls, poor graphics, bad performance, and with absolutely no configurability.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Have an AMD 1090T with a Crossfired Radeon 6870s. Rig is old, but moderately beefy. Game ran fine on medium settings. May not have 4k textures and 16x anti-aliasing, but any hardcore gamer can deal with a little graphic fidelity loss for a playable game(r_picmip 5 anyone?)
This comparison should be viewed in light of the recent allegations that the PC version's graphics were deliberately handicapped.
Were the allegations true?
Well, no... But...
... uh...
This comparison should be viewed in light of the recent allegations that the name Watch Dogs infringes on numerous trademarks by Swatch!
... are those allegations true?
Again, no... But...
... uh...
This comparison should be viewed in light of the recent allegations that Ubisoft's developers are child molesters!
... are any of those allegations true?
Well...
... um...
This comparison should be viewed in light of the recent shut up!
Hey, Slashdot? How about reporting News for Nerds, not Unsubstantiated Opinions for Nerds? We already have Fox News for that.
In the old days, we all had windows desktops which could be modded and used to play games in addition to it's usual uses.
Now all the kids (and myself) only own Mac laptops, and don't want to buy a windows desktop just to game.
So the easy choice is to drop $200 no a game console to augment the Mac.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
You can't just compare the Xbox one with a PC of the same price on horsepower when the Xbox one is sold at a loss, making its money back on licences.
This game is ridiculously resource intensive on the PC. I usually do a big upgrade on my PC every 5 or 6 years. I just upgraded to a factory overclocked 780ti, z97 mobo, SSD to hold games, 24 gigs of ram (I also run a lot of VMs during the day for work), and a 4790K CPU this past week. With all that this game still struggles to stay at or above 60FPS, dipping to the 40's at times. It is a terrible port.
Titanfall, while not quite so bad, is another game that seems to demand more than it should from the PC. I really hope this isn't the start of a really bad trend of porting over crap, shoving it out the door, and telling the PC community to just throw more hardware at it. My last system lasted 5 years before it really needed an upgrade. I expect the same from this one but I'm starting to think I'm not going to be so lucky.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Consoles can push the envelope of the hardware they have. With mantle and the upcoming changes to dx and ogl we can expect some improvement. But a lack of hardware consistency, an OS designed to run loads of processes, unauthorized cpu use, etc make pcs a less "nice" atmosphere. if you even use the original xbox, apples to apples hardware (733mhz coppermine, whatever geforce was in there) a pc couldnt make halo look as delicious. plus there are things like hardware audio decompression and effects guaranteed which may not be available on some codec-based audio solutions.
The game is rubbish, so who cares which hardware it runs best on?!
You have to consider that Watch Dogs, like most Ubisoft games, is a shitty PC port that's badly optimized. It's deliberately designed to perform better on consoles since the PC version is crippled from the get go.
So this is where we're at now? Not just pay-to-play and inflammatory nonsense, but straight-up government-grade XBOX propaganda where we hear complete garbage like "statistically, only a minority of gamers have this sort of high-end hardware", when your bog-standard $200 R9 270x or Nvidia 760-whatever *smokes* the current console generation in terms of image quality. FPS, and resolution?
Not to mention the hilarity of this all centering around "Watch_Dogs", a game that is a textbook example of publisher bait-and-switch and making promises that are never delivered upon. Ubisoft is the Comcast of gaming.
This isn't even my opinion, this stuff is in wide discussion anywhere on the internet that cares about gaming in-general.
that the game was cripple... would only people with high end hardware notice? Perhaps... but so what? The PC is not the console. Its not a uniform one size fits all platform. You release your game with variable settings that end users can tweak to get the best performance for THEIR machine.
Its how its done. The engine makers build in the hooks to change graphics settings dynamically on the fly with no trouble for a reason.
Just offer it and move on.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
and has been in my box for over a year
obvious troll story
maybe the got some straight up cash for it. it's not like there wasn't a scandal about such bullshittery already.
I mean, fuck, we've ALREADY had articles about shit dogs having a pretty shitty pc port that has features it has disabled on purpose to prevent the pc version from looking better.
why the fuck would they choose watchdogs for doing this comparison? did the at least use the tweaks to bring the pc visual quality BACK to what it was on pre-release demo videos of the game? since you can do that on the PC but you can't do that on the xbox and that makes the PC version look a lot better(to the point of it looking like the pr material distributed pre-release)..
of course the PC to run it like that costs more today than xbox one.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I have a feeling that the author of the OP works for M$
Surprising results would be Ubisoft making a PC port that's stable and efficient right out of the gate and doesn't attack its customers with onerous DRM. The headline almost reads like an Onion article.
nice advert /Â
its from ubisoft.
a crap firm.
with a crap history.
and crap games.
crap in,crap out.
leave the tat to consoles.
concentrate on turning out one good pc game a year,forget all the ports etc,just one good one a year,
or if valve,7 years (a qyick hint
Still a high end (and more expensive) PC will always beat a console in terms of performance
Instead of performance, argue selection. There are more PC games not available for any given console than games for some console not on PC at all. Unless you're a fan of a particular first party universe (like the Smash Bros. universe) or a genre that historically gets ignored on PC (like platform fighting or JRPGs), you'll find more to choose from on PC.
Oh, and FRAND standards aren't completely proprietary, but they aren't free either.
I can also buy much cheaper games without having to pay a quite expensive console tax
With consoles, you can often buy one copy for the household instead of a separate copy for each player. I'm not aware of any modern PC games doing StarCraft-style spawn installation.
With PC at a lan party everyone has their own screen so far better multi-player gaming.
I thought games for Xbox platforms supported System Link play. Besides, buying one console and sharing a screen is a lot cheaper than buying two to four gaming PCs if you have an SO or kids. What advantage does a separate view offer for things like fighting games and cooperative platformers?
Value for money largely depends on how many games in your sample set offer a same screen multiplayer option for those who want to use it. One copy of a $60 game can be cheaper than two copies of a $40 game.
The cited review is one of the worst I've ever seen - judgement is _solely_ done using screenshots and some crappy video not even showing the same scene - no fraps (not necessarily the best thing, but pretending to be objective doesn't hurt either), nothing... And then the claim: For playing Watch Dogs on PC you have to spend so much more money than for a console, since, you know, you NEED this >300$ GPU, because the game needs soo much VRAM - which is something you can even get for 100$ (gt740 with 4gb...) with console-like computational capability. But hey, still the author sees no need for lowering res to console levels (just around half the pixels), to make a fair comparison, or to specify which graphics cards he used (I think using my 1GB HD6850 would just produce this results - but it is basically 3 years old...)!
Considering that, I don't hope that Microsoft is financing such kind of Internet Troll...
I bought my GPU for 250 dollars 4 years ago and it still runs all games on high settings.
this is a terrible comparison. because the comparison should have only included PCs capable of running games in the first place. this generally means you have purchased a $200 or better graphics card at the moment the game was launched to go with it.
this is the equivalent of buying an Xbox or PS and for your PC, making your PC a gaming center. if you don't do this then your PC is not capable of playing games and you shouldn't expect to be able to run the PC version of any game whatsoever.
true gamers who use their PC for a replacement or competitor to consoles DO upgrade and DO buy graphics cards that aren't garbage.
and those are the only people who should expect to play games. just like 14+ years ago.
back then you knew if you didn't have a GeForce 2 GTS or a fucking Voodoo or a Radeon 7500 you knew you weren't going to be playing the game very well or at all. don't know what most computers had but if you didn't buy the gaming options you couldn't play .. lol.
todays systems are equipped with shit graphics by default just the same as always. you know, might be an Intel CPU, or even a Radeon built into an AMD CPU.. those are not anything but designed to run the desktop and basic CPU only tasks. the GPU acceleration while it may work is not meant for games of any caliber..
It's just another of those shitty articles to try to attract new audiences (and at the same time alienate old). This slashdot article is representative of why I no longer visit this site more than, lets say, 2 times per month now. Shame.
If you bought a PC game there's no reason you can't all play on the same PC. Attach the PC gaming rig to the TV in the living room, add USB controllers, and you have a shared system. That's a false dichotomy you've made there.
There's no practical limit on the number of USB controllers you can attach to one PC, and they do support split screen games. So they can do all that already, plus more.
Just ordered a PS4 with The Last of Us Remastered. Looking foreward to it. I also want to play whatchdogs then, but I heard so much negativ opinions about it. Also that the graphics just on PC in super resolution is good, and not so much on the PS4. What do you guys think about the gameplay?
"...but unless you've spent $300 or more on a fairly recent GPU, you're not going to be able to run the game at sufficiently high detail to benefit from the enhanced image quality and resolution."
What gamer junkie doesn't have a kick ass video card? $300 for a GPU is nothing when you can drop $6-700 USD on the latest and greatest offering.
Most PC gamers I know spend about as much on a GPU upgrade around new console launches (give or take 2 years) than you would spend on a console.
CPU and RAM haven't had much in terms of upgrade options in ... 5-6 years? (anyone who spent well back then is likely still gaming on such a system quite fine).
The exception is PCI express standards which may be limiting newer GPUs system bandwidth, but lets be frank - all AAA games shipping to date don't have the quality of textures required to saturate even PCI Express 1, so it's a moot point short of uncompressed HD-res texture mods.
Actually steam supports family sharing now. http://store.steampowered.com/sharing/
I spent more on my Nvidia 780 than my buddy's xbone cost. Of course it bloody well better look better on PC than on some peasant console...
Family sharing isn't a great solution. A library can only be accessed once, so you if are playing a game on your main PC someone else spouse/kid can't be on another playing a game out of the same library. The only real solution is for non-online games which is to go into Steam offline mode and the games can be accessed on two different machines.
Sony's system on the PS4 is slightly better. On machine is defined as the account's "home" system. Any content is then accessible from any other account logged into that console. You can then sign into another console with the account and access all of the content. Locking online multiplayer behind a pay service sucks, but the ability to play online is also shared with on the "home" system. So if you bought games digitally on one main account, you can easily play the same copy online with another person.
Sorry but the console won't get any better over the years and PC hardware will. So even a year from now, everyone will be playing Watch Dogs at a higher quality.
This whole article is misleading and pointless, as it has been discovered (and confirmed by UbiSoft themselves) that UbiSoft INTENTIONALLY crippled the graphics of PC versions (only) of WatchDogs.
http://www.maximumpc.com/ubiso...
Assuming the asshat game developer didn't intentionally cripple it, top end PC graphics will always be capable of more/better performance than consoles. Its just common sense, not least because a top-end GPU card alone costs significantly more than an entire console.
Actually, even Origins looks pretty decent on a modern rig. One of the nice things about PC games is sometimes they get *better* over time. I've just started playing it a few months ago and considering the age it looks quite nice with all settings turned up to full. When I look at the trailers, they actually look somewhat crappy compared to my current gameplay (and youtube walkthroughs made on older hardware look particularly dated).
Macs are PCs.
True in the sense that Macs are general-purpose computing devices where the person who owns it controls what computing it does. True in the sense that games work once you buy, install, and reboot into a copy of Windows. But false in the sense that they are compatible out of the box with "PC games" that have deliberate anti-Wine measures.
I've got a couple that are definitely targeted at a gamepad rather than a keyboard/mouse. Injustice: Gods Among Us comes to mind. My solution was just to steal some controllers from the XBox and use them on the PC.
My buddy has the same game on console. The big difference:
I paid under $30 on a Steam sale, and got the "extended edition" or whatever it's called with all the addons. He paid around the same, but every time he starts it up his Playstations tells him about all the fun addons he *could* have is he's just willing to shell out another $15-30 for the expansions.
Also, it actually looks a bit better on the PC with the settings turned up.
Normally a Linux distribution will not run "Games for Windows" without an emulator which in my case I could not be bothered to do
Wine is not an emulator; it is a PE executable loader and an independent reimplementation of the Win32 API. This means Wine is a "Windows emulator" to the extent that Fedora is a "UNIX emulator". Or do games using the "Games for Windows Live" library have particular problems with third-party Win32 reimplementations the way games using PunkBuster do? Or to which "emulator" were you referring?
I can even run EMU games such as NES, SNES, Megadrive etc.
With the Retrode discontinued, what do you use to make ROM images of your NES, Super NES, and Mega Drive cartridges for use with your emulators?
IMHO the gamer has to make the choice of which gaming system they prefer.
And this choice has to be made on the basis of available games. A lot of especially indie games are PC-first or PC-only.
you get a lot of console to PC ports but hardly a sniff in the other direction.
You can port up but you can't port down.
Of course you can port down if the game is designed for such. An indie studio's debut game is often released as a PC exclusive, even if it's controller-friendly, because console makers prefer experienced companies. Once sales pick up, a game might gain interest from a licensed publisher, and then the console port is based on the game's controller support.
Was there a serious problem with the console port of Spelunky or Cave Story or La-Mulana?
If you bought a PC game there's no reason you can't all play on the same PC.
One problem is that a lot of major-studio games designed around multiple controllers are released on one or more consoles and never make it to the PC until emulators catch up a decade or more later. This is more common in some genres than others. And a lot of games that do make it to PC have their split-screen mode cut out. The best guess I've seen as to the reason relates to what you suggest next:
Attach the PC gaming rig to the TV in the living room, add USB controllers
I'm under the impression that the number of end users are willing to do this is commercially insignificant compared to online PC gamers. Please see comments like those I linked here. It's a vicious cycle: people don't buy a gaming HTPC because of too few games supporting couch co-op, and major publishers don't fund the development of PC games supporting couch co-op because of too few deployed gaming HTPCs. Or how has the tradition of users being unwilling to set up a PC in the living room changed over the past few years?
There's no practical limit on the number of USB controllers you can attach to one PC
USB game controllers are either HID joysticks or XInput controllers. Unlike XInput controllers, HID joysticks have an inconsistent button layout across brands. Plugging in a console controller and having its buttons already configured is more convenient for users than having to rebind buttons every time you plug in or plug out a HID joystick.
and they do support split screen games
That's true so long as the publisher bothers to allocate money toward a split-screen mode. But I don't see how a PC can support a same-screen multiplayer game that isn't ported to PC (and isn't old enough to be emulated well), or a game whose PC version has had split-screen cut out. Or have those too become less common over the past few years?
The word "Jews" is roughly as offensive as "Muslims" or "Christians" or "black people", that is, not offensive by itself. Example: "A few of my co-workers are Jews, and they've introduced me to interesting cuisine." It becomes offensive once you start blaming Jews, Christians, black people, or any other ethnic or religious group for some ill of society without clear and convincing evidence behind your claims. Some people might reply to your posts to try to refute what arguments you do present, as sincere extremism is hard to distinguish from satire.
"Niggers", on the other hand, specifically invokes attitudes dating from the era of American slavery. Like "kikes", the word already has its mind made up. People don't reply because they know from your use of "niggers" that you're trolling. So unless you're referring to a newsgroup for discussing Number, Integration, Group, Graph, Enumeration, Ring and Set theory, stay the hell away from the word "niggers".
So anyway, what are female "watch dogs" called? Is "watch bitches" too offensive?
watch dogs sucks.
SOMETHING TO DEFINITELY be AVOIDED -> http://developers.slashdot.org...
APK
P.S.=> No questions asked - you've shown myself, and probably others here as well, you have NO clue, and shoot your mouth off on things you have no idea of the capabilities they have either... apk
Look up Total Buscuit's video on 'was watchdogs crippled on PC', and tell me if the results between PC and xbone are surprising. They deliberately disabled the more advanced features, aka the ones we saw in the e3 video, on the PC despite the fact pc has little issue running them. Just to make so-called be then consoles look competitive.