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Booting up Watch Dogs on Xbox One directly after a PlayStation 4 play session is a surprisingly pleasant experience. 792p? Really? The introductory engine-driven cut-scenes - along with many other in-engine sequences - are a remarkably close match, not only with the PS4 version, but with the PC release running at full 1080p. Moving into gameplay, the difference becomes more evident, but one thing to make clear from the off is that the emphasis in Watch Dogs' presentation is on lighting and effects and how they interact with materials, and this kind of emphasis remains flattering despite the difference in resolution. Titanfall - another 792p title - didn't compare well to its higher-resolution equivalent, but Watch Dogs on Xbox One gets away with it.If there's one word to sum up the advantage that PS4 Watch Dogs has over its Xbox One equivalent, it's refinement. Reduced aliasing here, less frequent screen-tear there - the impression you get is of a game that fundamentally offers the same package but feels a little more polished and solid on the Sony platform. Obviously, given the choice we'd take the extra refinement, but Xbox One owners can still buy Watch Dogs safe in the knowledge that Ubisoft Montreal's gameplay vision is delivered intact.
On PC, the story isn't quite so rosy. Despite the release of drivers from AMD and Nvidia apparently optimised for the game, we cannot find any way of playing this game at maximum settings without some off-putting performance issues. We've tried GTX 780s in SLI, Radeon R9 290X, GTX 780 Ti and even the 6GB GTX Titan, all of them backed up by a six-core Intel i7 3930K - a level of CPU power that significantly exceeds the recommended spec. In all cases, there are frame-rate and consistency issues that need to be resolved, and a particular rethink is required in the way that AMD graphics hardware handles this game.
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