Are you ready to venture into the narco world? Then you’d better brush up on your Spanish, because Ghost Recon Wildlands is sending you and your fellow ghosts to one of the largest cocaine-producing countries on the planet. Your mission is simple: infiltrate Bolivia, take down the uprising Santa Blanca drug cartel, and sever their ties with the corrupted government.
What really makes Ghost Recon Wildlands special is the open-world environment. Unlike previous Ghost Recon titles, there is no linear story progression. You’re free to explore the map and progress as you please. Ubisoft has gone so far as saying that Wildlands is the company’s biggest open world yet. So, common sense tells us we’re probably going to need some serious firepower to run the game smoothly. It’s time to put ROG’s Pascal graphics cards to the test to see how well they run what may be one of Ubisoft’s most demanding titles yet.
Graphics Options And Image QualityIf there is one thing Ubisoft’s developers have shown us in the past, it’s that they’re experts at replicating real-life places in video games. The digital version of Bolivia featured in Wildlands was created using the same AnvilNext 2.0 game engine as For Honor, which we’ve covered in another graphics performance guide, and it looks absolutely stunning. The accurate representation of the beautiful Bolivian landscape and weather really helps bring the game to life.
Ghost Recon Wildlands puts five graphics presets at your fingertips. You can choose between Low, Medium, High, Very High, and Ultra settings. In addition to the default presets, the player also has access to the following technical graphics settings:
- Antialiasing
- Ambient Occlusion
- Draw Distance
- Level Of Detail
- Texture Quality
- Anisotropic Filtering
- Shadow Quality
- Terrain Quality
- Vegetation Quality
- Turf Effects
- Motion Blur
- Iron Sights DOF
- High Quality DOF
- Bloom
- God Rays
- Subsurface Scattering
- Lens Flare
- Long Range Shadows
Ultra Preset
Very High PresetThe Ultra preset makes Ghost Recon Wildlands look visually impressive. Terrain and objects are sharp and realistic thanks to high-resolution textures. Dropping down a notch to the Very High preset makes minor sacrifices to the graphical fidelity, particularly in the quality of the terrain and vegetation. It also reduces the detail of the God Rays effect, which makes the lighting less realistic for the distant portions of this scene.
High Preset
Medium PresetThe High preset reduces the quality of the shadows, terrain, and vegetation to a point where the downgrade is beginning to be more noticeable but is still acceptable. We can still tell that we’re playing Ghost Recon Wildlands. Substantially lower graphics quality starts to make its presence known with the Medium preset. With the setting, the overall quality of the terrain and vegetation is below average, resulting in a loss of details and sharpness. The textures at a distance are blurry as well.
Low PresetWildlands loses all its visual attractiveness on the Low preset. The lack of antialiasing makes jagged edges stand out too much, and the entire image looks over sharpened. Shadows are also disabled completely for characters and other objects.
Test System And MethodologyProcessor: Intel Core i7-7700K
Cooler: EKWB Predator 360
Motherboard: ASUS Maximus IX Formula
Memory: HyperX Fury 16GB (2x8GB) 2666MHz
Graphics Card: ASUS Strix GTX 1050 Ti, GTX 1060, GTX 1070 & GTX 1080
Storage: Kingston Savage 480GB
Power Supply: In Win SIII-1065W
Case: In Win D-Frame 2.0
Operating System: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit Anniversary Edition
Drivers: NVIDIA 378.66 WHQL
Display: ASUS PG27AQ
The game client was updated to the latest version available. For the sake of simplicity, I’ve used the graphic presets as they are without any modifications. The only option I’ve disabled is V-Sync, for obvious reasons. I used Fraps to capture individual frame times during a custom sequence and then converted the data to FPS for easy interpretation. The system was restarted before each benchmark run.
Graphics Settings AnalysisFirst, let’s look at how individual graphics settings affect performance. These tests were conducted at 3840 x 2160 resolution with the Ultra preset using the Strix GTX 1080. The results are presented in average frames per second (FPS).
Anti-Aliasing helps smooth edges, transparent textures, and particles with the purpose of increasing the graphic fidelity for low and high resolutions. The results show that there is no performance benefit from choosing one method over the other on the Strix GTX 1080. You can configure this option based on your personal preference.
Ambient Occlusion is a technique that creates soft shadows between two or more objects that intersect with each other. You can choose HBAO+ or SSBC techniques, and it doesn’t really matter which one, because the performance impacts are similar on the GTX 1080. However, you can disable this option completely to gain 2.3 FPS at 4K resolution.
Like the name implies, the Draw Distance option dictates the maximum distance at which certain objects are drawn by the rendering engine. Since the results indicate that there is nothing to gain when running a lower setting on our graphics card of choice, we’ll just leave this option on Very High.
The Level of Detail option determines the distance at which the geometry detail decreases. The GTX 1080 gained 1-1.5 FPS depending on which setting was used. If you must run a lower setting on this card, stick with Very High.
The Texture Quality option regulates the resolution and fidelity of the game’s textures. On the Strix 1080, the performance cost between the Ultra, High, and Medium settings is imperceptible. There isn’t a good reason to step down from Ultra.
The VRAM meter on the bottom right of the Graphics menu indicates the amount of memory that is consumed by each setting. With the Ultra preset and matching Texture Quality, the meter showed 4552MB. Dropping to High textures reduced VRAM utilization to 3552MB, using Medium textures cut it to 3302MB, and scaling back to Low brought the meter down to 2790MB. Adjust accordingly based on how much graphics memory you have.
The Anisotropic Filtering option allows you to determine the sharpness of textures viewed at a distance or angle. On the Strix 1080, the differences in performance are so tiny they can be ignored. You can leave this option on the 16x.
The Shadow Quality option defines the resolution and filtering for all the in-game shadows. You can gain 4.7 FPS dropping to the Very High setting, 5.2 FPS from the High setting, and 4.6 FPS from the Medium setting. If you can live without shadows, disabling this option increases average frame rates by 7.4 FPS with the graphics card and resolution I tested. The Very High setting is the perfect balance between quality and performance here.