Benchmarked: How Well Does Watch Dogs Run On your PC?

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Watch Dogs is one of the most anticipated games of 2014. So, we're testing it across a range of CPUs and graphics cards. By the end of today's story, you'll know what you need for playable performance. Spoiler: this game is surprisingly demanding!

Results: Ultra Detail, 1920x1080

This time around we keep our 1920x1080 resolution, but increase graphics detail to the Ultra preset. Quality improves noticeably; however, graphics hardware is also pushed much more aggressively.

It takes a Radeon R9 270 or GeForce GTX 760 to render at least 30 FPS at these settings.

Check out the Radeon R7 260X and GeForce GTX 660, both of which encounter significant dips as they progress through our benchmark run. I generated multiple data sets to confirm this behavior, and it's indeed repeatable. Only our overclocked GeForce GTX Titan (approximating GeForce GTX 780 Ti performance) achieves well over a 35-FPS minimum rate.

Once again, there are a lot of latency spikes across many of the cards we're testing. Nvidia's GeForce GTX Titan is the only board exempt from the punishment.

Don Woligroski
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Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.