razor512 said:
Watchdogs currently has a few DRM issues where it it will periodically perform some kind of scan that causes a lag spike in the game on mid to lower mid CPU's
In watchdogs, the renderer is single threaded (generally using the first core) (thread nvwgf2umx will generally fully occupy a single core, generally during the lag spikes a previously idle MSVCR100 thread will become active and cause a corresponding drop of CPU usage of the render thread, and the end result during gameplay is a large drop in framerates in addition to a large drop in GPU usage. (it goes away after a few seconds), if you have the other issue extremely frequent large lag spikes (e.g., going down to single digits very frequently while driving) then the game is likely starved for video memory and the dumping of unneeded textures and loading of new ones causes a huge performance bottleneck which will also cause a drop in GPU usage while new data is loaded to video memory)
Other than that, there are certain bugged areas in the game where certain objects will not 100% touch, when you find those and are able to see through some of the map, this causes the game to render a lot more than it normally will and you will notice a huge drop in framerate and higher video memory usage (and lower GPU usage, and thus a lag spike that doe snot go away as long as you are looking at that gap) I only found one spot in the game that has that issue (don't remember the exact location, but it is at a gun store near one of the train lines)
(Not sure how much help it will be, but disabling aero will usually free up a few megabytes of video memory)
Thanks for explaining it! was a big help.