jimmysmitty said:
apcs13 said:
Well I don't doubt that you will be able to make the game look alot better on your PC with much more GPU power, I kind of worry about that CPU. The recommended CPU is either an 8350 at 4.0 GHz or a 3770, and seeing that your CPU is not only less powerful than the 8350, but also has fewer cores and a lower clock speed, I feel as though you may have trouble maintaining an acceptable framerate. Also, keep in mind that meeting the recommended requirements does not mean that you will max the game and get 60 FPS. In fact, I meet even the optimal requirements for Crysis 3(the highest requirements, the tier above recommended), yet it is proven that in optimal conditions my GPU only get 40 ish FPS in the game.
I would wait for the game to come out and hear about the optimization grade, but even with all of this being said, PC is probably going to be more fun, higher graphical fidelity, and pretty solid frame rate as well.
Crysis is never a great game to use for comparison. Crysis 1 was actually horribly optimized. It launched with a very bad memory leak. I had 4GB back then and after an hour play session it loaded up all my memory then when I closed the game my system crashed due to insufficient resources, the game didn't let go of the memory.
It will by no means need a i7 or a 8 core CPU. If it is truly multithreaded then the FX 8350 would have a slight advantage since it has about 180% of a dual core while HT only gives 20% better performance at best.
I think that it will need an i7 or 8350 if you want to run it will all of the bells and whistles turned on at 60+ FPS, for a few reasons.
Usually, when developers set recommended specifications, the game usually never runs better than that. For example, if a dev said that you should have an 8-core CPU @ 3.5 GHz, it won't run better than recommended settings on a quad core at 3.0 GHz, if anything it will run worse.
To cite an example of this, ARMA II recommends an AMD Athlon X2 4400+ dual core CPU, which is 2.3 GHz on the clock speed. However, on my 6350, which is a 6-core processor which I have over clocked to 4.4 GHz, will only run the game at 60FPS in optimal conditions, usually closer to 30 FPS. I have 8GB of RAM and a GTX 770, so no issue there either because it persists on every graphical setting, lowest or highest.
Now, you will probably say that ARMA II is poorly optimized. I will agree that yes, it is a bad case of an optimized PC game. Now my question is, how do you know that Watch Dogs will be well optimized for the PC? My theory is that it will be very poorly optimized, because it is being developed for PC, PS4, XBox One, Wii U, PS3, and Xbox 360. That is spreading dev resources too thin over many varying hardware architectures. They're going to make it good on console first since they are one set of unchangeable hardware, so it is easier to optimize for. That means PC will get the short end of the stick.
That's why I believe they are recommending such powerful CPUs, to excuse their lack of PC optimization.
Also, open world games are incredibly CPU taxing. Look at GTA IV and Saint's Row IV. Both were also poorly PC ported, but nonetheless, you can't yet judge on the same for Watch Dogs, and they were both sluggish open world games.
Remember, games don't run better than expected, they either run as well or worse.