Ubisoft’s bringing Vulkan support to Ghost Recon Breakpoint

Ubisoft loves the Vulkan API, and following the success of the company’s Vulkan implementation in Rainbow Six: Siege (Benchmarks here), the company has decided to extend their support for Vulkan to new titles, starting with Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. 

On March 24th, Vulkan API support will arrive on Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, arriving as part of the game’s 2.0.0 title update. With this update, gamers will be able to select Vulkan or DirectX 11 as their graphical API of choice, depending on which API delivers the best system performance. 

Performance is key, and Ubisoft wants its games to run well on modern gaming hardware. With this in mind, Ubisoft decided that they needed to move away from DirectX 11, and into modern APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan. 

Why are modern graphical APIs better? 

Modern graphical APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan offer developers the opportunity to better optimise their games for the latest graphics hardware, providing more control over CPU and GPU resources to help increase framerates and increase both CPU and GPU parallelism. 

While it has taken many years for DirectX 12 and Vulkan to see widespread adoption, it is quickly becoming clear that games using these APIs are becoming faster than their DirectX 11 counterparts, especially when it comes to CPU performance. 

APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan also exposed to developers new hardware features, such as asynchronous compute, improved texture streaming and increased multi-threading capabilities. In Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, Ubisoft wants to leverage these features to increase their game performance by leveraging the power of Vulkan. 

What will Vulkan support add to Breakpoint? 

Ubisoft has highlighted three major features that Vulkan support will add to Ghost Recon: Breakpoint;

Asynchronous Compute

Since the game’s console release, Ghost Recon: Breakpoint has utilised Asynchronous Compute to offer higher performance levels on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Now, thanks to the game’s Vulkan API support, this feature is available to PC players.

In Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, Ubisoft has used Asynchronous Compute to optimise some of their game’s graphical features to run concurrently, reducing the rendering times of these features. These reduced rendering times result in higher framerates. The impact of this feature on Ghost Recon: Breakpoint’s performance depends on several factors, the most important of which is your PC’s graphics card.

Dynamic Buffer Cache

Thanks to the enhanced memory controls offered by the Vulkan API, dynamic data can be used to make Breakpoint’s graphical pipeline more multi-threaded, resulting in greater CPU utilisation and increased framerates. This will allow Ghost Recon: Breakpoint to run at higher framerates in CPU-limited scenarios.  

Improved Texture Streaming

Using Vulkan, Ubisoft can now use the dedicated transfer hardware within your graphics card to stream textures much faster than before. This will increase the smoothness of Ghost Recon: Breakpoint when using the game’s highest texture settings. 

More information about Ghost Recon: Breakpoint’s Vulkan support is available in the video below.