Watch Dogs: Legion’s PC build struggles to achieve 1080p 60FPS on an RTX 2080 Ti at maxed settings

Watch Dogs: Legion will be the first game from the publisher to support real-time ray tracing, a next-generation feature which will be exclusive to the game’s PC and next-generation versions. 

After accessing a preview build of the game, Digital Foundry’s Tom Morgan noted how demanding the game was on PC, revealing that the preview ran at a locked 1080p 30FPS at what appeared to be Ultra settings on an RTX 2080 Ti. Note, that this preview build was likely locked at 30FPS to match the game’s console editions, and to deliver stable capture footage. Even so, unlocking the game’s framerate proved exactly how demanding Watch Dogs: Legion can be. 

When running the game with “maxed settings”, Ubisoft’s preview build of Watch Dogs: Legion was unable to run at 60FPS on a PC with an RTX 2080 Ti. This highlights how demanding Watch Dogs: Legion can be with ray tracing enabled, though it is worth noting that Ubisoft’s AAA PC games often go overkill when it comes to graphical settings. Just try running any recent Assassin’s Creed game on PC with maxed out settings… 

While it looks like ray tracing will be a demanding feature on Watch Dogs: Legion, it is worth noting that the game will support DLSS on PC. This feature will help boost the performance of Nvidia’s latest RTX series graphics cards, though this feature wasn’t tested as part of Digital Foundry’s early analysis. 

At this time, we can only guess at the performance impact of ray tracing within Watch Dogs: Legion. Many other advanced PC settings could be crippling the game’s RTX 2080 Ti performance. Even so, sub-60FPS performance at 1080p on at £1000ish graphics card isn’t great, even if it is with a pre-release version of the game.