Nvidia's most powerful GPU is having problems running the preview build of set to release on October 29th following a delay due to COVID-19.
Watch Dogs: Legion is an ambitious title to say the least. It is set in a dystopian police-state version of London which is ruled by a private military force. The player represents an underground hacking organization called DedSec who is attempting to liberate their city. Rather than control a single protagonist throughout the game, the player can recruit just about anyone they see on the streets of London. These recruits become fully playable characters with their own abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. Every mission and every cutscene can be experienced as any one of these characters. The implications of such a concept are staggering.
Watch Dogs: Legion is ambitious in more ways than just its premise. The game is one of Ubisoft's first to feature real-time ray tracing, a graphically intensive rendering method that attempts to accurately simulate the path of light through environments and across objects. This adds an extra level of realism to the experience at the expense of a lot of processing power. A recent preview build of Watch Dogs: Legion featured ray tracing and was set at the highest graphical setting, but it was also locked at 30 frames per second. As Digital Foundry reported in a preview video (thanks, DSOGaming), trying to bring the build to 60 FPS with all other settings maxed proved too much for the graphics card to handle.
This is a problem, because Digital Foundry was running an NVIDIA RTX2080ti, the company's most powerful GPU and one specifically designed to handle ray tracing. Failure in a system this powerful is not a good sign for the game. It should be noted, however, that Digital Foundry was not using NVIDIA's DLSS technology, an upscaling system that uses AI to achieve smoother performance. The effect this would have on the performance of Watch Dogs: Legion, which does DLSS, remains to be seen. Still, such a powerful piece of PC gaming technology struggling this much without the aid of an additional piece of technology is a bad omen.
Ambition is a volatile thing in the games industry. It can bring titles to heights of success other studios can only dream of, or it can backfire terribly and mark a game as a disgrace and a failure. There is nothing about Watch Dogs: Legion that doesn't push the envelope in remarkable ways. If it succeeds it could go down in history as a landmark of the industry, proof of the power of ray tracing technology and of the ingenuity of the developers, creating a whole city of playable characters. If it fails, then at least it will have accurately traced the rays of the sun it flew too close to before it fell.
Source: Digital Foundry, Dark Side of Gaming