Conclusion

"Watch_Dogs 2" is a significant improvement in gameplay over the original Watch_Dogs. You play a hacktivist in San Francisco who has to team up with his buddies in DedSec to stop whatever ctOS 2.0 is doing with the data it's collecting from all citizens in the city.

The new Disrupt 2.0 engine is a revamped version of the engine that powered the original. Unfortunately, it still uses DirectX 11, but given how bad the track record of DirectX 12 games is so far, this might not be bad thing. Graphics-wise, the game looks great, with good visual detail in all scenes. Only flat areas like streets look a bit too flat, lacking some geometric detail. An optional high-res texture pack is available as a free download and the game settings provide tons of dials to adjust performance. There is no frame-rate (FPS) cap and field of view can be adjusted by up to 110°, both of which are certainly welcome in the PC-gaming arena.

Performance on AMD Radeon graphics cards is a little bit lower than what we would expect, but this is no surprise given Watch_Dogs 2 bears an NVIDIA "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" badge, inferring that NVIDIA helped Ubisoft in the development of this game. Both companies have delivered game optimized drivers yesterday, which, especially on AMD, shows that the company is right on track with providing timely driver updates to gamers for new titles. We used these GeForce 376.09 WHQL and Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.11.5 drivers in this article.

Overall performance is decent, but could be a bit more optimized - Watch_Dogs 2 certainly doesn't look as good as Battlefield 1 for example, which runs at higher FPS across the board. VRAM usage is very reasonable, especially without the optional high-res texture pack. With its details maxed out, Watch_Dogs 2 runs comfortably on most >$200 graphics cards, at 1080p resolution. The RX 470 is a little more reassuring compared to the GTX 1050 Ti, which is too close to the 30 fps mark (below which playability degrades). The GTX 1060 6 GB is comfortably faster than the RX 480 8 GB. AMD's fastest GPU, the R9 Fury X, still doesn't breach the 60 fps mark.

To enjoy the game at 2560 x 1440 with the highest details, you need to invest in a GeForce GTX 1070, which can be had for around $390 right now. The performance-segment cards run close to the 30 fps mark. 4K Ultra HD is a daunting task for all single-GPU graphics cards we have. Even the GeForce GTX 1080 barely holds things above the 30 fps mark. Given that the game supports both NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFire, you could look into something like GTX 1070 SLI or R9 Fury X CrossFire to tame this beast.

What's also worth mentioning is that gameplay feels very smooth, even at sub-60 FPS rates. I'm also happy to report that there is no weird mouse acceleration and the driving controls have been significantly improved over the first Watch_Dogs. Overall, we love this game. It's reasonably well coded so far and the game's rendition of San Francisco is gorgeous. We look forward to adding this game to our VGA bench.