Ghost Recon: Wildlands Closed Beta PC Performance Review

Conclusion

Ghost Recon Wildlands’ Closed Beta is a very mixed bag, offering a high attention to detail in the graphical options menu but releasing with a large number of performance issues and with graphical options that are too demanding for all but the most expensive of gaming systems.   

To start off the game’s Very High graphical preset is simply too much for almost any modern PC, with even Nvidia’s GTX 1080 struggling to achieve a steady 60FPS framerate at 1080p. Add to this the game’s sub-par performance on AMD hardware and on Nvidia’s older generation GPUs, with Nvidia Maxwell GPUs offering much less performance than their Pascal equivalents AMD’s R9 Fury X offering very similar performance to their newer RX 480.     

It seems that Ubisoft still has plenty of work to do on this game’s performance on PC, which not only extends to framerates and general performance numbers but also to several graphical issues at certain settings, especially when it comes to texture streaming. While playing the game we often found the game using low-quality textures, with Nvidia hardware often using these textures for lengthy periods before updating to their higher resolution counterparts. This was a huge problem at Low and Medium graphical quality presets, with road textures, in particular, becoming a blurry mess when driving through the world. 

When playing games on PC, most gamers prefer to play games at high framerates of 60FPS or above, which makes playing Ghost Recon: Wildlands a challenging experience, especially when you want to play at high settings or above. At 1080p we needed to play this game with a GTX 1070 in order to play at a reasonably steady 60FPS, which is some insanely high hardware requirements for a modern title, especially since a large portion of GTX 1070 users enjoy playing games at 1440p.  

Graphically Ghost Recon Wildlands is very impressive, though this is at High or Very High settings where PC gamers require ludicrously powerful hardware to run with respectable framerates, which will no doubt leave a lot of gamers disappointed. 

To summarise, Ghost Recon Wildlands does do a lot of stuff well, with a high-quality graphical options menu and a large selection of graphical presets and settings. What the game does not do well is provide high levels of performance on a wide range of hardware and still comes with a lot of minor visual issues and bugs that need to be addressed before the game officially launches on March 7th. 

With performance issues on older hardware and some super demanding graphical options/presets, Ghost Recon Wildlands is just asking to receive huge amounts of ridicule from PC gamers, especially those using mid-range PCs or use older hardware configurations. Personally, I hope that Ubisoft can work to address these issues as this game approaches launch, as right now the game has far too many issues to be an easy sell to PC users. 

 

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