Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands Review - PC Gameplay And Performance

Ghost Recon: Wildlands is not only one of Ubisoft's more expansive game worlds, even more definitively, it is the most immersive and engaging experience the company has produced since Assassin's Creed and the Far Cry series revamp. The AnvilNext engine is in rare form here, creating a living, breathing world with dynamic weather effects, a day/night system, lush flowing trees, grass and other foliage, real-world physics and more.
The game is filled with land, sea and air traffic, pedestrian citizens trying desperately to mind their own business and so much more to interact with. It's fun to hover miles over head in a chopper, or roll up on the side of the road in a vehicle and just take it all in. This game world itself really is an amazing achievement.

However, before we jump into the benchmarks we should discuss a few other performance areas. Many players, will experience lag spikes and single-digit framerates if the gamepad option was enabled in the game's control settings, and no gamepad is present. If you're experiencing something similar and you don't have a gamepad, try disabling the feature.

Among the many bells and whistles thrown in for NVIDIA-powered gamers is Ansel support for 3D, VR and ultra high resolution screenshot capturing. Sadly the function doesn't work in co-op. While playing solo, it works fine if you play in Uplay offline mode. Otherwise, it performs with an unsettling amount of stutter and chugging performance, more so at higher resolutions. Overall at low-res things smooth out, but ultimately it's a cool feature in need of patching.

Finally, Ghost Recon: Wildlands features some of the most painstaking load times, which are greatly affected by your storage subsystem speed. We eye-balled speeds with the game installed on both a Samsung 512GB 850 EVO SSD and a Corsair MP500 M.2 SSD, the latter dropping us into the game in about 1:18 (minutes:seconds), versus the near-2min initial load time with the Samsung 850 SATA drive. These are roughly the times it takes to go from the game running on the desktop, to boots on the ground in Wildlands.

Ghost Recon: Wildlands Benchmarks

 
Wildlands has its own internal benchmark utility which is very much in line with real-world performance when we actually had boots on the ground and running around in-game. We ran the benchmark on all the game's three main presets High, Very High and Ultra. We ultimately settled on the Very High preset  for our official testing with 16x Anisotropic Filtering, though Ultra is very playable with sub-60 FPS on a GeForce GTX 1080 and there are plenty of in-game settings to tweak, so you can achieve a nice balance between quality and performance according to your preference. Overall, we see the game taps about 70% GPU usage at 1440p with the Ultra setting--only reaching near-100% when pushing things to 4K.