Watch Dogs 2 was confirmed in February to no great surprise, but it was still nice to have it made official. The game is still quite a way from completion, but Ubisoft dropped a hint about what’s coming at an AMD press conference at GDC: Specifically, as reported by The Country Caller, that it will support DirectX 12.
The fact that DX12 is in the cards isn’t really any more shocking than the existence of a sequel to a major publisher’s tentpole franchise, but that the announcement was made at an AMD event is, I think, a little unexpected. Ubisoft made a good bit of noise about the original Watch Dog’s support for Nvidia-specific technology ahead of its launch, so it’s not hard to read significance in the decision to make an attention-grabbing confirmation like this from the other side of the fence.
Ubi didn’t go into detail about how exactly DX12 will be implemented, but hopefully it will at the very least help deliver better out-of-the-box performance than we got from the original Watch Dogs, which suffered from some serious issues with lag and stuttering at release. As far as potential benefits go, we’ve got a good breakdown of what DX12 brings to the tables, for developers and gamers alike, right here.
No hint of a Watch Dogs 2 release date was given at the event, but Ubisoft said in its FY2015-16 Third Quarter Sales announcement that it’s expected to come out sometime during its 2016-17 fiscal year.
