With Percentage-Closer Soft Shadows (PCSS), the experience of seeing your GPU run out of steam isn't limited to GeForce owners. Be forewarned: it's a hardware-killer, and only available on second-generation Maxwell- and Pascal-based graphics cards. It’s supposed to combine different sharp and soft shadow geometries with each other in a more realistic manner. The first is called Hybrid Frustum Traced Shadows (HFTS), and it's Nvidia-exclusive. No matter how you feel about them, Watch Dogs 2 implements not one, but two GameWorks shadow features. And as is often the case with new games, Nvidia's GameWorks libraries aren't far behind. Watch Dogs 2 makes gratuitous use of light, which casts a lot of shadows. Perhaps enabling SMAA and calling it a day is preferable, which brings us back to the beginning of our discussion. Powerful hardware helps a lot, of course.Īnother option is sticking with the old-school approach: MSAA (2x to 8x), though that comes with its own set of downsides. Dial in the lowest TXAA setting and adjust the sharpness to taste. As usual, finding the right compromise is key. There’s a drawback though: the picture becomes a bit blurry. GeForce owners can use TXAA (2x/4x/8x), which practically eliminates the flickering. Just don't expect the best visual fidelity. The result’s fairly muddy, but this setting is easier for your graphics card to handle and it does help combat aliasing artifacts. Temporal filtering can be activated as well, which provides an upscaled lower-resolution picture. Gamers with lower-end hardware or a relatively small amount of graphics memory won’t be able to get around SMAA or FXAA post-processing. Fortunately, there are several anti-aliasing settings, some of which can be combined, to alleviate this issue.
WATCH DOGS 2 PC BENCHMARK FULL
Watch Dogs 2’s open world looks fantastic and offers a lot of variety, but the detailed environments and high-resolution textures also suffer from flickering jagged edges that are on full display as soon as you start moving around. MORE: All Gaming Content Anti-Aliasing & Performanceīeauty comes at a price. Everybody has their own preferences when it comes to graphics, and Watch Dogs 2 provides the tools to experiment and adjust everything to your specific tastes. Ultimately, your best bet is choosing the preset that yields frame rates you're comfortable with, and then fine-tuning from there.