As part of the recent PC spec breakdown for Watch Dogs: Legion, for 4K Ultra Settings with ray-tracing the GPU required to power a reflective rain-soaked London is the brand-new (and next-gen in its own right) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080.

Plus, as per the spec-sheet in order to hit the uncapped 60fps or so, DLSS would need to be enabled. This is all a round-about way of saying that we're not surprised to hear about the next-gen console performance targets for Watch Dogs: Legion with ray-tracing enabled.



As part of a Reddit AMA Lathieeshe Thillainathan, Live Producer on Watch Dogs: Legion at Ubisoft confirmed the following.

Ray tracing, 4k, 30fps on PS5 and Xbox Series X.

Naturally the immediate response was a variation on the "why not 60fps" theme. Or, in the case of the Series X - why not 120. The answer of course comes down to the sheer performance cost to enable real-time ray-tracing - which Watch Dogs: Legion features for reflections. Something we saw in our recent hands-on preview session and can confirm looks great in-motion (as per the video above).

With Spider-Man Miles Morales also targeting 30fps for its 4K ray-traced mode on PS5 we should probably expect to see this sort of thing in games and modes that opt for visuals over frame-rate. But, seeing as performance modes are becoming the norm, the recent Xbox Series X previews seemed to be all about offering up different options, we'd love to see developers and publishers actually take a step back from 4K as the only option to turn on all the fancy stuff. Maybe go 1440p 60fps or even 1080p 60fps.

On the PC front NVIDIA's DLSS technology is basically that solution - keep the frame-rate up via using a lower-res image as a baseline across an entire range of GPUs. In that case though, the AI behind DLSS somehow manages to make a 4K DLSS image look as good or better than native - hence why it's been one of the most talked about bits of pure graphics rendering and game technology this past year.

So much so that it's 30-40% bump in performance is something we'd love to see pop up on the Xbox Series X and PS5. Albeit a similar AMD solution for the RDNA 2-tech inside each of the next-gen consoles. Watch Dogs: Legion is out at the end of the month and we'll be diving into its RTX solution on PC in addition to how it fares on the next-gen consoles next month.