Ubisoft's upcoming dystopian London will be available for us to explore in just over a month, and Watch Dogs Legion has shown off some pretty impressive ray tracing effects and features already. Because of the expansive world and top of the line next-gen tech, many have been worried about the game being incredibly demanding. Well, the official system requirements for Watch Dogs: Legion have been revealed, and they're pretty darn extensive...
First of all, the requirements listed include 1080p Low and High graphics settings, 1440p High, 4K Ultra, plus 1080p High graphics settings with ray tracing enabled as well as 4K Ultra RTX on. This allows for some pretty extensive customization for performance to your liking.
Unfortunately, Ubisoft did not clarify the kind of game performance we can expect for each settings, but we can imagine it would be for 60fps. In addition, they did not specify whether any of these specs were with the use of Nvidia's DLSS technology, but considering the preview build was supposedly unable to run 60fps on Ultra settings with an RTX 2080 Ti, we imagine that the ray tracing specs at least include DLSS enabled.
What's interesting though, is that if you wish to play on Ultra graphics settings at 4K resolution, you will need to download a 20GB high-res texture pack as well to get the right level of visual quality. Additionally, it is recommended that you use a Dual-channel setup for your RAM when playing above Low graphics settings at 1080p resolution or higher.
Now with all that said, let's jump into the good stuff and take a look at the Watch Dogs Legion PC system requirements for 1080p, 1440p, 4K and raytracing specs...
Ray tracing off
Watch Dogs Legion system requirements 1080p Low Settings
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- CPU: Intel Core i5-4460 3.2GHz or AMD Ryzen 5 1400
- RAM: 8GB
- GPU RAM: 4GB
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 or AMD Radeon R9 290X
- HDD: 45GB
Watch Dogs Legion system requirements 1080p High Settings
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- CPU: Intel Core i7-4790 or AMD Ryzen 5 1600
- RAM: 8GB (Dual-channel setup)
- GPU RAM: 6GB
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 480
- HDD: 45GB
Watch Dogs Legion system requirements 1440p High Settings
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- CPU: Intel Core i7-7700K or AMD Ryzen 5 2600
- RAM: 16GB (Dual-channel setup)
- GPU RAM: 8GB
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super or AMD Radeon RX 5700
- HDD: 45GB
Watch Dogs Legion system requirements 4K Ultra Settings
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- CPU: Intel Core i7-9700K or AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
- RAM: 16GB (Dual-channel setup)
- GPU RAM: 11GB
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti or AMD Radeon VII
- HDD: 45GB (+20GB HD Textures Pack)
Ray tracing on
Watch Dogs Legion system requirements 1080p High Settings
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- CPU: Intel Core i5-9600K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600
- RAM: 16GB (Dual-channel setup)
- GPU RAM: 8GB
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070
- HDD: 45GB
Watch Dogs Legion system requirements 4K Ultra Settings
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- CPU: Intel Core i7-9700K or AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
- RAM: 16GB (Dual-channel setup)
- GPU RAM: 11GB
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
- HDD: 45GB (+20GB HD Textures Pack)
In order to play Watch Dogs Legion on the typical recommended system specs at 1080p resolution and High graphics settings, you will need at least a GeForce GTX 1060 or Radeon RX 480 graphics card. The best processor to pair with this would then be either a Ryzen 5 1600 or Core i7-4790, as well as 8GB of RAM. This setup should then deliver around 60 frames per second.
Watch Dogs: Legion will need a GeForce GTX 960 or Radeon R9 290X GPU in order to play on Low graphics settings at 1080p resolution, with a Core i5-4460 or Ryzen 5 1400 CPU to reach the minimum required specs. 8GB of system memory is also needed in order to run WD Legion at 60fps.
Finally, looking over all the system requirements, Watch Dogs Legion will need a PC with at least 4 year old hardware in order to run on High graphics settings at 1080p resolution, and at least a 2 year old PC in order to run on Ultra graphics settings at 4K resolution. It is also recommended to be using the DirectX12 API, so make sure your graphics card supports it, otherwise DX11 is also available still.
As ever, remember you can always check out how well your PC can run the Watch Dogs Legion System Requirements here, where you can check benchmarks and performance from other users. Compare your graphics card to the Watch Dogs Legion GPU benchmark chart and we also have a Watch Dogs Legion Frames Per Second system performance chart for you to check.
Login or Register to join the debate
PC Specs
Yeah... no.
1080p high requiring a 2070 and 4K ultra only requiring a 2080 Ti.
There's a 4 fold increase in graphick demand with a 60% (best case) increase in performance.
PC Specs
Nice, seems like i'll be fine even with ray tracing on, maybe turn some settings down for consistency.
PC Specs
What about RTX 3070? It only has 8GB VRAM, while recomended is 11GB :D
PC Specs
ayeeeeee my rx580 is still relevant hopefully same can be said for cyberpunk 2077
PC Specs
It's ubisoft so optimisation isn't going to be good on the other hand CDPR put way more effort in their game so it might run even better
PC Specs
And explains why you have downvotes lol. There's a difference between unoptimized and demanding. Unoptimized means you get fps drops and frametime spikes, ie fortnite and pubg but no one complains about those. Demanding is a game that renders a lot of shadows, edges and a lot of AA. That can be solved by people actually tweaking their settings. I have a full library of ubisoft games and not a single one of them is unoptimized.
PC Specs
Even AC Origins? AMD GPU's really struggle in that game, and encounter the problems you mention. I'm not savvy enough to know whether that's the game's problem or if the fault lies with AMD themselves though.
PC Specs
I don't agree. Ubisoft games have far inferior quality of graphics to many other game engines and are still way more demanding which could fall into the category of the engine itself being unoptimized since it cant run to its full hardware counterpart potential. although I'm not a fan of CDPR "optimization" either so..
PC Specs
there are some ubisoft games that are very unoptimized out there and thats a fact
PC Specs
I'm pretty sure ubi games are u optimised from ACBlack flag to recent ones also Watch Dogs 2 and many others.. At least from the cpu side it's really badly optimised
PC Specs
I have no problems with AC Origins, i get an average of around 50-60fps playable no problem with no crazy dips or anything. It's like Division 2, runs amazing in dx12, i get 73 fps np (i cap my fps since i have freesync). Watch dogs 2 runs beautifully on an SSD, an HDD might be fast enough but the response time is what kills it and why most games run like crap on an HDD when lots of things need to be rendered. I do agree that some of their games are badly optimized but it's not as many as people make it out to be. Then again I know what I'm doing when it comes to PCs and software.
PC Specs
For example, i paly Siege quite a lot, i get above 200+ fps average under Vulkan and only time i get dips are server related when there's lag. Otherwise the game never dips, uses all my cores equally and that's on a mix of high with vhigh shadows. It's possible that some games might be doing things in the background and causing cpu usage to spike and fps to drop.
PC Specs
I do agree that it certainly isn't most of them. Assassins Creed 3 is the only other one I've had problems with, and that's the original not remastered. AMD really suffered in Boston. I mean I drop to my low 40's in an eight year old game. Division 2 runs flawlessly, AC Odyssey was perfectly acceptable for me too.
PC Specs
Yea in Boston because there's lot of buildings. Anytime there's edges to render every card suffers it's not just AMD. I mean look at MSFS2020, every single card suffers because there is SO much to render, buildings, clouds blah blah blah. I don't hear anyone saying it's unoptimized lol.
PC Specs
My mistake it was AMD CPU's back in the day. I just installed it again to test, it relies heavily on 1-2 cores and GPU usage plummets as a result. I imagine higher clocked Intel CPU's fair much better. Poor resource utilization/management surely comes under the term unoptimized.
PC Specs
I am loving the low and high requirements for all 3 resolutions, wish more games had that as specs. Excited to try it out on my rig.
PC Specs
So this is gonna be both dx11 and dx12? Curious to see perf difference
PC Specs
Is that for max 60 fps? Historically, these games were a mess.
PC Specs
True but now that next gen both use ryzen it should be much better optimized cpu wise. The problem was they needed SSDs to run better. I had 1 and it ran like crap put it on an SSD, MUCH smoother, same with WD2. They are demanding games not unoptimized it's a difference.
PC Specs
These are most likely for 30 fps, they always target 30 fps.