Watch Dogs and Far Cry 4 unexpected stutters and FPS drops

[sudiptopati]

Hey there...

I recently upgraded my graphics card to a gtx 970 strix 4 gb oc edition.. here are the rest of my specs

AMD phenom ii x6 1100t black edition
500gb hdd
8gb ddr3 1333mhz RAM

my monitor is an old one.. it's max resolution is 1360x768.. will upgrade it along with cpu and RAM when I have enough money to splurge again.. i have started off playing far cry 4 with minor microstuttering issues at ultra settings, which i know is normal as UBISOFT makes horribly optimized PC games.. I played watch dogs last year on a Radeon 6950HD card at medium settings.. and it ran sort of okay.. not butter smooth, but playable.. but with the new card, i am playing with everything maxed out.. but still the fps continues to drop, especially when i'm driving around the open world.. the thing is.. i am playing at a really low resolution. so why are these fps drops occurring? for people playing at 1920x1080 and above i guess its okay. but i just dont understand why this is happening at my resolution. the gtx 970 is overkill for 1360x768 right? it should be running really smooth. Is this the game's problem or something else?

 

[triley]

Stuttering at low resolution with a powerful GPU is usually a sign of a CPU bottleneck. Decent processor but it's a bit old and the game most likely doesn't use all six cores.

 

[sudiptopati]

Stuttering at low resolution with a powerful GPU is usually a sign of a CPU bottleneck. Decent processor but it's a bit old and the game most likely doesn't use all six cores.

right! i did read up on bottlenecks a while back.. but unfortunately spent a lot of money buying the new GPU, mobo, PSU and cabinet.. so at this point of time no chance of buying a CPU 🙁 🙁 i tried lowering graphics settings but the fps keeps dropping during driving scenarios.. so could it be any other problem??

 

[loki1944]

I get massive stuttering on WD; it's not a VRAM issue, max VRAM usage is 2.4GB. Game is terribly optimized.

i7 5930K @4.5Ghz
32GB of 2400Mhz DDR4 15-15-15-35 2T
GTX 780Ti SLI
Running Watchdogs off of SSD
Nvidia driver 347.88

 

[LucoTF]

Two very badly coded games. Watch dogs is best played on high, not ultra - regardless of specs.

 

[Frag Maniac]

For Watch Dogs, try The Worse's mod that includes MaLDo's Texture mod, or just the latter if you're happy with no E3 features. The texture mod is made for high end GPUs that can run Ultra, but not without frame drops or stutter, esp while driving.

MaLDo's mod combines Ultra textures with High textures for the ones that hit hardest to smooth out performance. It's not even a noticeable visual tradeoff. SInce using it I've been able to run pretty much max settings and 4x AA even on a 7970.

For Far Cry 4, try disabling mip maps via the file edit commonly talked about, and enabling 1-3 buffer frames. You can somewhat compensate for the mip map disabling by forcing 16x AF in NCP.