Watch Dogs Graphics and Gameplay: PC Vs. Xbox One, With Surprising Results

MojoKid writes: Normally, the question of whether a game runs better on the PC or a console is a no-brainer, at least for PC users. Watch Dogs, however, with its problematic and taxing PC play, challenges that concept. And since the gap between consoles and PCs is typically smallest at the beginning of the console generation, HotHardware decided to take the Xbox One out for a head-to-head comparison against the PC with this long-awaited title. What was found may surprise you. Depending on just how much horsepower your PC has, the Xbox One (and possibly the PS4 though that wasn't compared) might be the better option. There's no question that the PC can look better, even before you factor in the mods that have been released to date, but unless you've spent $300 or more on a fairly recent GPU, you're not going to be able to run the game at sufficiently high detail to benefit from the enhanced image quality and resolution. If you have a Radeon HD 7950 / R9 280 or an NVIDIA card with greater than 4GB of RAM or a GeForce GTX 780 / 780 Ti, you can happily observe Watch Dogs make hash out of the Xbox One — but statistically, only a minority of gamers have this sort of high-end hardware. This comparison should be viewed in light of the recent allegations that the PC version's graphics were deliberately handicapped.

Bad Ports

[wisnoskij]

This is not new or unique. The PC is full of games that have ridiculously bad console-to-PC ports; With shitty controls, poor graphics, bad performance, and with absolutely no configurability.

Re:Say what?

[rwven]

Yeah, pretty much. Watch Dogs doesn't look nearly as good as plenty of PC games out right now, and runs worse than most.

This is nothing more than a deliberately handicapped, badly ported console game. The author is being a shill for the XBone, but the truth of the matter is that he's hiding Ubisoft's dirty downgrade of the game.

PCs were capable of far more than these machines a year before they were released. Now the comparison is just a bad joke.

A 7950 cost 149$

[Osgeld]

and has been in my box for over a year

obvious troll story

Re:Unless you've spent $300 on a GPU...

[Darinbob]

Unless you've spend $300 on an xbox... (or whatever they cost).

Basically PC games makes sense because most people already have a PC (or Mac). Currently, except for some high end recently released shooters (like watchdogs) in a competitive environment, you don't need a high end GPU and you can get by with a reasonably cheap one less than the cost of a console, or even play on a laptop.

Ten years ago with a mid-range system you would tweak and poke the settings trying to get the best view you could get without causing the game to stutter and lag, but today most games just work great out of the box. Ie, when Oblivion was new people would struggle to get things to look great while still being playable; today though you get Skyrim and accept the defaults.

So buying a console really doesn't save any money, unless you're getting it because you have kids or you want to keep the spouse of your computer. Plus you can even attach a game controller to the PC if you're the sort that prefers that to a mouse and keyboard.