All I had to do was run the game as ADMIN. Real performance boost

[Juancho]

Yeah. I think it's stupid and funny. This might help others. I hope. I can run the game smoothly on Ultra now, even if FPS sometimes suddenly drops to 20's during area transfers. Before this, I tried alt tabbing out of the game, and then running task manager, and then setting WatchDog's priority to high. That also worked. I never tried doing this before the patch.

Display settings:
Full screen
Refresh rate = 60
GPU max buffered frames = 1
1920x1080 res
Textures - High
Temporal anti-aliasing

Graphics - All at maximum settings with HBAO+ high

Specs:
AMD Phenom II x4 955 3.7ghz
G.Skill 8G RAM
Sapphire R9 280X Vapor X
Windows 7 64bit
Latest AMD BETA driver 14.6

[Modern Jazz]

Wait really? I'll try this out. You'll understand if I'm skeptical. :)

Are you running it at 60 fps?

[NecroAether]

Just tried it, gameplay is better then it was from before that's for sure.

[Harleyquinn]

Really? This works?

[Juancho]

Glad it worked for some.

Unfortunately my machine is nowhere near from running the game at a constant 60fps, it only runs at about 20s fps at the lowest and I think it can reach the 60s at areas where there are few people, cars, and buildings.

But after running the game as admin, the games seems to run smoothly (consistent framerate)

[Jim]

Well it does seem to stutter less when running the game as Admin, wow...

[MarkSix]

My game doesn't even start when I try to run as admin :(

[Juancho]

Before all this, I also found out that setting the "GPU max buffered frames" to 1 also gave me considerable boost in performance.

[borc]

Are you running Steam as Admin? Or just the game itself?

[Juancho]

@borc

just the game itself. I don't have the steam version

[Berghain]

Thanks for the tip, Juancho!
About to try this out. To get better performance did you only launch the Watch_Dogs.exe on Admin or Steam.exe, too?

[Sh1nRa358]

You're right. I get 26 fps on standard account (even though it's still playable and unnoticable) and I get 50 fps on admin account xD

[hotcrawsbuns]

wut? i'm testing this nao...

[hotcrawsbuns]

OK I have zero stutter using this method. Tested using fast car driving in the loop at night. I usually would get 40-60 fps with frequent pauses down to 20 fps while assets load. Now i get absolutely zero stutter, stays 50-60 fps at all times, turning, explosions and whatnot.

Windows 7
680 GTX (2gb video ram)
8GB RAM
i5 processor @4300 mhz

Using game recommended settings:
1200p
High texture
Temporal SMAA

Shadows high, otherwise mix of high/ultra.

I strongly recommend this and deleting your xml file if you have monkeyed with it. At least start there, then start turning up one setting at a time until you can't take the performance hit.

[borc]

Are you running steam in admin or just the game?

[Sh1nRa358]

It's also funny that on my laptop for this game, 26 fps feels like near 60fps and 50 fps feels like near 120 fps but it just doesn't show it as such. I play on Ultra with Shadows on High instead of Ultra. Weird.