It has been a little over a month since Ubisoft released a trailer for the next Watch Dogs game. At that time, it was also announced that NVIDIA would be working with Ubisoft to incorporate real-time ray tracing in the game. Digital Foundry has now revealed a less-than-stellar performance from green team’s flagship card.
Watchdogs: Legion features ray-traced reflections. As Digital Foundry discovered, running the game in 1080p can be a taxing experience for the RTX 2080 Ti under ultra settings. The game was locked at 30 FPS during testing and provided a smooth experience, but when they unlocked the frame rate, things proved to be too much for the top-tier card. At that point, they were unable to achieve a constant 60 FPS. NVIDIA’s super-sampling technology, DLSS, was not used in this test, but it is more than likely that the card might have been able to consistently reach the golden 60 FPS mark if it had been used.
Digital Foundry did comment that all ray-traced reflective surfaces looked beautiful. From windows, cars, to puddles on the street, all exhibited great detail (though some seemed to be rendered at a lower resolution). However, they did note that not all surfaces received the ray-traced treatment. Larger objects like the River Thames used standard screen space reflections. It will remain to be seen how, or if, the console versions employ ray tracing. Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X are expected to have some sort of ray-tracing functionality, but it is unknown how Watch Dogs: Legion will take advantage of their hardware. One thing is certain: those wanting to see it at its best will need a powerful GPU.