A couple of hours ago, Ubisoft released the highly anticipated PC update for Watch_Dogs. Naturally, a lot of gamers could not wait to get their hands on it and see for themselves whether the stuttering issue has been fixed or not. After all, Ubisoft claimed that it has added a number of performance improvements in this patch. Well, it appears this patch makes zero difference to the annoying stuttering, if not making it even worse than what it was before.

According to a lot of reports, this update does not fix the stuttering side-effects and in various cases it makes it even worse. We’ve been following NeoGAF, Guru3D, Reddit and Watch_Dogs official forum, and almost all users are reporting a far worse experience after applying the latest update. Even users with SLI Titan cards are experiencing major stuttering while driving.

In case you’re wondering, this patch also breaks compatibility with TheWorse’s mod, however there is a workaround. Here is what you have to do in order to re-enable TheWorse’s mod with this latest version of Watch_Dogs (or you can downloaded an updated version that Guru3D’s member ‘SoloCreep ‘ created from here). Kudos to Steam’s member ‘Elvis II’ for the guide.

“The mod uses the same method that Ubisoft uses to patch their games. It was always inevitable that an official patch would overwrite the mod files. The mod still works, you just have to unpack the files and repack them with the new patch.dat.”

We strongly suggest disabling auto-updates from UPLAY at this point. Those of you we’re experiencing worse performance can disable auto-updates and then delete both patch.dat and patch.fat. By doing this, you’ll be reverting back to the vanilla version.