Watch Dogs Legion, the game about rebellious hackers in a futuristic post-brexit London, is out today, giving us the freedom to recruit anyone we want for our underground hacker group. It certainly looks pretty good, but how well does it perform on your current hardware and what are the graphics option sticking points that hack the power from your own hardware?
Watch Dogs Legion seems to be a pretty demanding game, as evident by our PC performance report, but what video settings are the most demanding? Are there some WD Legion options we can turn all the way up without much of a performance hit? And is there any settings we should prioritize to immediately turn down if we're experinccing some performance issues? Let's find out...
First of all, In this article we will take a look at which Watch Dogs Legion graphics settings are the best to turn to Ultra and which ones can get us a frame rate boost for no real visual loss when we turn them off or down. We've compiled a list below of the most demanding graphics options in the game, so you can get a handle on what to expect when you adjust different graphics settings in Watch Dogs Legion to get the perfect balance of visual fidelity and FPS performance in game.
Below you will see every graphics option listed and benchmarked against a minimum graphics setting used as our baseline benchmark for Watch Dogs Legion. From there we see which graphics options have the highest performance impact on our hardware for the least visual improvement, and then we will see which options can be turned up to max and deliver the best visual improvement in Watch Dogs Legion.
If you want to look at some more graphics benchmarks with various gaming graphics cards running Watch Dogs Legion then you can check out our Watch Dogs Legion PC Performance Benchmarks article instead, or you can have a look at the various Watch Dogs Legion PC Graphics Settings that we'll be discussing here in this article.
Watch Dogs Legion PC system requirements
Watch Dogs Legion PC performance report and graphics card benchmarks
For the performance cost result baseline we used the recommended GPU for 1080p High settings GeForce MSI GTX 1060 graphics card, an Intel Core i7-5820K processor, and 16GB of DDR4 memory. To standardize the benchmark tests they were all carried out using the in-game Watch Dogs Legion benchmarking tool, whih takes you ona short tour of Camden market shortly before ombat breaks out between 2 factions. There's a good mix of everything here, and we found this run to be pretty representative of the experience in-game, when considering graphics options compared to other graphics options and their relative performance impact.
If you see any significant discrepancies/differences between the benchmark tool FPS and actual FPS returned then please do share your findings in the comments below.
There's a lot of graphics settings available in Watch Dogs Legion, so we went through all the 15 graphics options listed and tested each one in turn, recording the average frame rates for each and then comparing them to a baseline FPS that was recorded with all the graphics options either turned off or to their lowest settings.
Watch Dogs Legion baseline FPS
To give us a comparable FPS baseline for WD Legion Frame Rates achieved when all the graphics settings are on lowest or OFF.
| Watch Dogs Legion | Avg FPS | Min FPS | Max FPS | 1% Low | 0.1% Low |
| Baseline | 68.2 | 52.2 | 79.4 | 49.5 | 40.8 |
Watch Dogs Legion Graphics Options Performance Breakdown
The further to the right the bar goes, the more demanding the graphics option is.
What are the most demanding graphics options in Watch Dogs Legion?
As you can see in the graph above, There aren't a whole lot of demanding graphics settings in Watch Dogs Legion. However, the ones that are the most demanding have a pretty significant drop in frame rate performance.
By far the biggest FPS drop comes from the Shadows graphics setting, which drops frame rate by almost 40% when turning up to Ultra. If you're experiencing any frame rate issues in Watch Dogs Legion, then your first port of call would be the Shadows setting.
Next up is Reflections, which has an FPS performance cost of 16%. This setting also enables Anti-Aliasing to be set to TAA when turning it up to High or above. Additionally, the Extra Details settings also drops FPS by about 13.5% when turned all the way up to 100%.
As for the rest of the options, Ambient Occlusion (which also automatically enables TAA Anti-Aliasing), Post-Process Anti-Aliasing, Environment, Geometry and Motion Blur all come at around 4-7% FPS cost, whilst the rest of the settings have a negligible impact on frame rate.
Graphics settings CPU load, GPU load and VRAM usage at 1080p resolution at Ultra or option turned On:
| Graphics setting | CPU Load | GPU Load | VRAM usage (MB) |
| Geometry | Medium | Minor | +0 |
| Environment | Medium | Minor | +26 |
| Texture Resolution | Major | Minor | +2956 |
| Texture Filtering | Medium | Minor | +0 |
| Shadows | Major | Major | +877 |
| Headlight Shadows | Minor | Minor | +5 |
| Reflections | Minor | Major | +269 |
| Depth of Field | Minor | Minor | +0 |
| Motion Blur | Minor | Minor | +3 |
| Bloom | Minor | Medium | +3 |
| Ambient Occlusion | Minor | Minor | +45 |
| Post-Process Anti-Aliasing | Minor | Minor | +45 |
| Subsurface Scattering | Minor | Minor | +0 |
| Ray Traced Reflections | Major | Major | +716 |
| Extra Details | Major | Major | +0 |
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Watch Dogs Legion All Graphics Settings Benchmark Guide
Best Video Settings in Watch Dogs Legion
There's quite a few graphics settings to go through in Watch Dogs Legion, but that does mean we at least have a lot of options to choose from so we can properly customize and tweak all the settings to get optimal performance.
Below we've provided both a score for the performance impact as well as a priority score designed to recommend which graphics settings you should prioritize turning up (the higher the number, the better).
Obviously, these scores are subjective and we really do encourage you to share your own thoughts in the discussion area below on what you think are the best Watch Dogs Legion graphics settings are. But for now, let's jump in...
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Geometry
Geometry Ultra setting performance impact
Geometry graphics option High compared to Ultra
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[slide your cursor over the images to compare. Click to enlarge]
| Avg FPS | Min FPS | Max FPS | 1% Low | 0.1% Low | |
| Baseline | 68.2 | 52.2 | 79.4 | 49.5 | 40.8 |
| Geometry | 65.4 | 50 | 76.9 | 47.7 | 42.7 |
Geometry option range: High/Very High/Ultra
Performance impact: 2/5
Priority: 4/5
What does the Geometry setting do in Watch Dogs Legion? Adjust the graphic complexity of the world geometry. Affects all objects in the game.
CPU Load: Medium
GPU Load: Minor
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Environment
Environment Ultra setting performance impact
Environment graphics option Low compared to Ultra
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[slide your cursor over the images to compare. Click to enlarge]
| Avg FPS | Min FPS | Max FPS | 1% Low | 0.1% Low | |
| Baseline | 68.2 | 52.2 | 79.4 | 49.5 | 40.8 |
| Environment | 65 | 51.3 | 75.1 | 47.2 | 41.7 |
Environment option range: Low/Medium/High/Ultra
Performance impact: 2/5
Priority: 4/5
What does the Environment setting do in Watch Dogs Legion? Adjust the terrain and vegetation level of detail. This setting affects the radius of the physical simulation of foliage, detail level of fog, and the amount of simultaneously visible traces of bullets or other occlusions, like when stepping on the grass surface.
CPU Load: Medium
GPU Load: Minor
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Texture Resolution
Texture Resolution Ultra setting performance impact
Texture Resolution graphics option Lowest compared to Ultra
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[slide your cursor over the images to compare. Click to enlarge]
| Avg FPS | Min FPS | Max FPS | 1% Low | 0.1% Low | |
| Baseline | 68.2 | 52.2 | 79.4 | 49.5 | 40.8 |
| Texture Resolution | 68.1 | 52.4 | 79.1 | 49.2 | 40.4 |
Texture Resolution option range: Lowest/Low/Medium/High
Performance impact: 1/5
Priority: 5/5
What does the Texture Resolution setting do in Watch Dogs Legion? Adjust texture resolution. Higher values require more video memory. This option requires a reload of the game world to take effect.
CPU Load: Major
GPU Load: Minor
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Texture Filtering
Texture Filtering Ultra setting performance impact
Texture Filtering graphics option Low compared to Ultra
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[slide your cursor over the images to compare. Click to enlarge]
| Avg FPS | Min FPS | Max FPS | 1% Low | 0.1% Low | |
| Baseline | 68.2 | 52.2 | 79.4 | 49.5 | 40.8 |
| Texture Filtering | 67.8 | 54.2 | 78.8 | 50.6 | 42.5 |
Texture Filtering option range: Low/High/Ultra
Performance impact: 1/5
Priority: 5/5
What does the Texture Filtering setting do in Watch Dogs Legion? Adjust the quality of anisotropic filtering of textures. Reduce blurring when textures are displayed at some angles.
CPU Load: Medium
GPU Load: Minor
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Shadows
Shadows Ultra setting performance impact
Shadows graphics option Low compared to Ultra
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[slide your cursor over the images to compare. Click to enlarge]
| Avg FPS | Min FPS | Max FPS | 1% Low | 0.1% Low | |
| Baseline | 68.2 | 52.2 | 79.4 | 49.5 | 40.8 |
| Shadows | 42.7 | 36.9 | 48 | 35.5 | 33.6 |
Shadows option range: Low/Medium/High/Very High/Ultra
Performance impact: 5/5
Priority: 2/5
What does the Shadows setting do in Watch Dogs Legion? Adjust the quality of the shadows. Higher values allow for more detailed and realistic shapes. This can be demanding on the graphics card VRAM resource at higher settings.
CPU Load: Major
GPU Load: Major
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Headlight Shadows
Headlight Shadows 4 Cars setting performance impact
Headlight Shadows graphics option Off compared to 4 Cars
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[slide your cursor over the images to compare. Click to enlarge]
| Avg FPS | Min FPS | Max FPS | 1% Low | 0.1% Low | |
| Baseline | 68.2 | 52.2 | 79.4 | 49.5 | 40.8 |
| Headlight Shadows | 67.7 | 54.2 | 78.9 | 51.5 | 44.2 |
Headlight Shadows option range: Off/Your car/2 cars/3 cars/4 cars
Performance impact: 1/5
Priority: 5/5
What does the Headlight Shadows setting do in Watch Dogs Legion? Adjust the quality of vehicle headlight shadows. This option affects yours and nearby cars. This hits the VRAM as you increase the number of vehicles the game will process at any one time.
CPU Load: Minor
GPU Load: Minor
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Reflections
Reflections Ultra setting performance impact
Reflections graphics option Low compared to Ultra
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[slide your cursor over the images to compare. Click to enlarge]
| Avg FPS | Min FPS | Max FPS | 1% Low | 0.1% Low | |
| Baseline | 68.2 | 52.2 | 79.4 | 49.5 | 40.8 |
| Reflections | 57.2 | 46.1 | 65.2 | 42.5 | 39.3 |
Reflections option range: Low/Medium/High/Very High/Ultra
Performance impact: 4/5
Priority: 4/5
What does the Reflections setting do in Watch Dogs Legion? Adjust the quality of in game reflections. Higher values will increase the detail and the amount of reflected objects. Setting this option to High or above will also cause Post-Processing Anti-Aliasing to be set to TAA. This option is replaced by Ray Tracing if that is turned on.
CPU Load: Minor
GPU Load: Major
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Depth of Field
Depth of Field On setting performance impact
Depth of Field graphics option Off compared to On
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[slide your cursor over the images to compare. Click to enlarge]
| Avg FPS | Min FPS | Max FPS | 1% Low | 0.1% Low | |
| Baseline | 68.2 | 52.2 | 79.4 | 49.5 | 40.8 |
| Depth of Field | 67.7 | 53.2 | 79.1 | 50.8 | 44.9 |
Depth of Field option range: Off/On
Performance impact: 1/5
Priority: 3/5
What does the Depth of Field setting do in Watch Dogs Legion? Toggle the Depth of Field. When on, objects outside the range of focus will be blurred.
CPU Load: Minor
GPU Load: Minor
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Motion Blur
Motion Blur On setting performance impact
Motion Blur graphics option Off compared to On
| Avg FPS | Min FPS | Max FPS | 1% Low | 0.1% Low | |
| Baseline | 68.2 | 52.2 | 79.4 | 49.5 | 40.8 |
| Motion Blur | 65.4 | 52.3 | 76.1 | 49.3 | 44.7 |
Motion Blur option range: Off/On
Performance impact: 2/5
Priority: 3/5
What does the Motion Blur setting do in Watch Dogs Legion? This is the usual, where the game adds blurred affects to objects as the player moves at speed.
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Bloom
Bloom On setting performance impact
Bloom graphics option Off compared to On
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[slide your cursor over the images to compare. Click to enlarge]
| Avg FPS | Min FPS | Max FPS | 1% Low | 0.1% Low | |
| Baseline | 68.2 | 52.2 | 79.4 | 49.5 | 40.8 |
| Bloom | 66.5 | 52.7 | 77.1 | 49.9 | 42.9 |
Bloom option range: Off/On
Performance impact: 2/5
Priority: 3/5
What does the Bloom setting do in Watch Dogs Legion? Turn the Bloom on or off. When on, adds high dynamic range glow around lights and other bright areas.
CPU Load: Minor
GPU Load: Medium
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Ambient Occlusion
Ambient Occlusion On setting performance impact
Ambient Occlusion graphics option Off compared to On
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[slide your cursor over the images to compare. Click to enlarge]
| Avg FPS | Min FPS | Max FPS | 1% Low | 0.1% Low | |
| Baseline | 68.2 | 52.2 | 79.4 | 49.5 | 40.8 |
| Ambient Occlusion | 63.1 | 50.6 | 73.2 | 47.9 | 42.7 |
Ambient Occlusion option range: Off/On
Performance impact: 3/5
Priority: 4/5
What does the Ambient Occlusion setting do in Watch Dogs Legion? Turn Ambient Occlusion on or off. Ambient occlusion provides soft shadowing of nearby surfaces. Enabling Ambient Occlusion will also cause Post-Process Anti-Aliasing to be set to TAA.
CPU Load: Minor
GPU Load: Minor
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Post-Process Anti-Aliasing
Post-Process Anti-Aliasing TAA setting performance impact
Post-Process Anti-Aliasing graphics option Off compared to TAA
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[slide your cursor over the images to compare. Click to enlarge]
| Avg FPS | Min FPS | Max FPS | 1% Low | 0.1% Low | |
| Baseline | 68.2 | 52.2 | 79.4 | 49.5 | 40.8 |
| Post-Process Anti-Aliasing | 64.7 | 50.5 | 75.4 | 47.8 | 41.6 |
Post-Process Anti-Aliasing option range: Off/FXAA/SMAA/TAA
Performance impact: 3/5
Priority: 4/5
What does the Post-Process Anti-Aliasing setting do in Watch Dogs Legion? Set the type of Post-Process Anti-Aliasing.
FXAA: runs well even on older hardware
TAA: more advanced, further reduce flickering and offer a better image
SMAA: good balance, better image than FXAA while slightly more demanding on hardware
CPU Load: Minor
GPU Load: Minor
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Subsurface Scattering
Subsurface Scattering High setting performance impact
Subsurface Scattering graphics option Low compared to High
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[slide your cursor over the images to compare. Click to enlarge]
| Avg FPS | Min FPS | Max FPS | 1% Low | 0.1% Low | |
| Baseline | 68.2 | 52.2 | 79.4 | 49.5 | 40.8 |
| Subsurface Scattering | 67.9 | 53.6 | 78.8 | 50 | 42.1 |
Subsurface Scattering option range: Low/High
Performance impact: 1/5
Priority: 5/5
What does the Subsurface Scattering setting do in Watch Dogs Legion? Choose the quality of Subsurface Scattering. When set to High, the visual quality of surfaces like human skin is improved.
CPU Load: Minor
GPU Load: Minor
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Ray Traced Reflections
Ray Traced Reflections setting performance impact
Ray Traced Reflections graphics option Off compared to Ultra
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[slide your cursor over the images to compare. Click to enlarge]
| Avg FPS | Min FPS | Max FPS | 1% Low | 0.1% Low | |
| Baseline | 65.5 | 47.6 | 81.2 | 23.2 | 21.4 |
| Ray Traced Reflections | 24.7 | 20.8 | 27.6 | 13.5 | 16 |
*Ray Traced Reflections option was benchmarked using an RTX 2080 for more representative performance of ray tracing when using an RTX graphics card. Baseline was conducted at Ultra graphics preset, and Ray Traced Reflections was benchmarked on Ultra settings. For reference, the FPS performance cost of Ray Traced Reflections is 62%.
Ray Traced Reflections option range: Off/Ultra
Performance impact: 5/5
Priority: 1/5
What does the Ray Traced Reflections setting do in Watch Dogs Legion? Enable DirectX Raytracing (DXR) for life-like reflections. Requires a GPU that supports ray tracing technology. This replaces the Reflections graphics option listed earlier.
CPU Load: Major
GPU Load: Major
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Extra Details
Extra Details setting performance impact
Extra Details graphics option 0% compared to 100%
| Avg FPS | Min FPS | Max FPS | 1% Low | 0.1% Low | |
| Baseline | 68.2 | 52.2 | 79.4 | 49.5 | 40.8 |
| Extra Details | 59 | 36.2 | 75.9 | 35.6 | 34.4 |
Extra Details option range: 0% > 100%
Performance impact: 5/5
Priority: 1/5
What does the Extra Details setting do in Watch Dogs Legion? Modify the level of detail for geometry of objects depending on distance, the higher the setting the more detailed distant objects will be. Only available if the Geometry setting is set to Ultra.
CPU Load: Major
GPU Load: Major
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Watch Dogs Legions graphics options performance impact final thoughts
Looking over all the results above, we can see that Watch Dogs Legion doesn't have a huge amount of demanding graphics settings other than a small few like Shadows, Reflections, and Extra Details. These settings should be your first priority when you want to squeeze out some extra frames.
After that there are only a few settings that have some impact on overall FPS, but their performance cost is almost negligible when compared against the 3 mammoth settings listed above.
It goes without saying that Ray Traced Reflections are incredibly demanding, though this should almost always be used in conjunction with DLSS on an RTX graphics card.
One of the biggest hits in the game is to the VRAM and the RTX 2080 we have was regularly pushed past its 8GB VRAM limit in all Ultra settings, which would start to cause issues. And this would certainly be a problem when Ray Tracing Reflections was turned on.
Overall, Watch Dogs Legion has a pretty good amount of graphics settings to tweak and customize to our liking, and allow us to get the perfect balance between image quality and FPS performance. There are a few settings which will massively help to increase frame rate by turning down if you need the performance boost.
So that's it for the Watch Dogs Legion most important graphics options benchmarks. SO now it's over to you guys! We want to hear from you your thoughts on the graphics settings in Watch Dogs Legion and share your experiences. Are there any setting that you immediately turn down for better performance? And which ones do you turn all the way up even if it costs some delicious frames? Let us know!
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PC Specs
Off topic, all of the advancements in the gaming industry yet still not a single dev can create a proper whip to work in a game the way a whip actually works.
PC Specs
Ubisoft is what my wife told me during our wedding night
PC Specs
Funny enough, picture here makes better case for using raytracing than whole Ubisofts video... :-D Yeah, I kno it was picked to emphasize it. But still, this makes it look better than trailer did and I find that bit silly. :-D
PC Specs
There is a weird bug in the game, for some reason (maybe reflection) looking at water drop the fps by 10 or more, this problem exist only in DX12 , DX11 runs fine but weak CPUs will struggle more compare to DX12,so pick your poison i guess.
PC Specs
Great amount of detail. I always love these. Keep it up :)
PC Specs
are the pics showing shadows swaped or something?
like it looks way better in low then on ultra
PC Specs
low is inaccurate, since you'd need an extremely clear day for leaf shadows to be that prominent, which...doesn't happen often in London :)
PC Specs
Exactly.
PC Specs
i see, so you get more peformance and better visuals not bad
PC Specs
No, that's not how it works. Having such "accurate" shadows requires work by your GPU. Having those intense shadows (low settings) puts less stress on your GPU. That's how it's always been in all games. In real life, shadows are not all one shade.
It's like comparing a stickman drawing of a 5-year old to a portrait made by a professional. The professional's drawing requires more effort to create and there has to be numerous variations in shading to create an accurate portrait. While a 5-year old's stickman drawing is one color and without any detail.
But if you prefer intense shadows though I suppose there's nothing wrong with that lol
PC Specs
@david - that's not what I wrote... Yiannis got it right.
PC Specs
no no what i meant there is that shadows on low looks better(in mine and my 2 friends opinion) and since thats low its less demanding, so you get both better look and better peformance.
shadows on ultra looks perhaps realistic but very bad and ugly at the same time washed out like something from a early 2000 game
PC Specs
Do you even have shadows in London? With the rain and clouds during the whole year?
PC Specs
The RT reflections look nowhere near as good in the actual game. That picture in the settings menu is misleading. Also, once you go out, and a very good part of the game you'll be outside, the frames are much lower than in the benchmarking tool, especially when driving. They should have made a benchmarking tool which shows driving at speed as well.
PC Specs
i barely see any improvement in visuals with RT on ,at least not in the bright sunny day
PC Specs
Yeah, in some situations it looks almost as good without and in some it makes no difference. I'm more interested in today's update which allegedly fixes driving fps drop. The driver update yesterday also added 2-3-4 frames, but it might just be placebo at that amount.