How to improve Watch Dogs performance and fps

Watch Dogs has been finally released by Ubisoft but sadly its unoptimized for PC consumers. Reports are rampant of massive frame rate drops and pesky stuttering even on high end machines.

To increase the frame rate and performance overall of the game you need to simply press alt+enter while in the game. This will make the game go into "windowed" mode which will drastically increase the fps.
After you engage windowed mode a title bar should appear at the top like in the screenshot above. There is not much cropped from the game to make room for the title bar and its a small price to pay for smoother gameplay.


If you do not like the title bar showing you may go to your game options->display and set windowed mode on "Borderless". The bar will disappear but you might get slightly worse performance than windowed.

You can see the fps change demonstrated in a video below: