Like many cutting edge AAA games, Watch Dogs: Legion will leverage Nvidia's RTX-driven ray tracing lighting technology to make the game world more reactive, and specifically, reflective. But it turns out that with current drivers and graphics cards, you have to sacrifice a lot to make the most of them. In early preview testing from Digital Foundry, ray tracing at its highest setting meant that even a $1,000 RTX 2080 Ti couldn't deliver 60 FPS at 1080p.
Ray tracing has been a difficult technology to employ for developers since 2018, when Nvidia first revealed its lighting system. Reflections, shadows, and even global illumination can add some serious overhead to a graphics card's rendering pipeline, even with high end options like the 2080 Ti. That's slowly improved over time as games have become better optimized and drivers have improved, but it's still extremely taxing.
That looks to be the case with next-generation games too. Watch Dogs Legion is an upcoming AAA title set to employ ray tracing for reflections, and in a preview test, it was found unable to hit higher than 60 FPS on 1080p at Ultra graphics settings. DLSS should improve that, but it wasn't tested in this case.
Next-gen GPUs in the Ampere RTX 3000-series are expected to improve this by a serious amount, but it's still not known to what extent.
If it comes down to it, would you pick ray tracing over resolution and frame rates?