Watch Dogs Graphics And Game Play: PC vs. Xbox One

For years, console gamers have sniped at PCs, claiming that you needed to drop ludicrous amounts of money into a gaming box every year or two in order to compete with consoles, which are held up as paragons of thriftiness. For years, I've rolled my eyes at these claims -- but with Watch Dogs, the console owners actually have a point. 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 resolution.


If you have a Radeon HD 7950 / R9 280 or an NVIDA card with >4GB of RAM or a GTX 780 / 780 Ti, you can happily watch Watch Dogs make hash out of the Xbox One -- but statistically, only a minority of gamers have high-end hardware; Steam's Hardware Survey reports Intel HD 4000 Graphics as the most popular solution followed by HD Graphics 3000 and the GTX 660. The first GPU with more than 2GB of RAM on the list is the GTX 760, with 2.1% of the market.

 

Obviously, we're not recommending anyone buy a PS4 or Xbox One just to play Watch Dogs, but if you already own a new console, there's a case to be made for buying on that platform -- even if you also have a midrange gaming PC. Right now, I'd say that Watch Dogs enormous VRAM requirements are a genuine outlier, but that could change in the next 12-18 months -- if more games start requiring more than 3GB of VRAM for high-end settings, the PC's stance astride the gaming world could be questioned.