Conclusion

Playing Ghost Recon Wildlands reminds me of Far Cry 4. You fight in a large open-world that's filled with lush vegetation and various sceneries. Interspaced and scattered among these are enemy camps, cities, and fortresses you have to take down to bring the fight to the Santa Blanca cartel in your quest to shut it down for good.

Ubisoft is using their AnvilNext 2.0 engine for Ghost Recon Wildlands, which we've seen in other titles, including For Honor and Steep. While it does not support DirectX 12, it makes full use of the features offered by DirectX 11. Sprinkle some NVIDIA GameWorks features on top and you have one of the best-looking games released so far. This game is the first to implement NVIDIA Turf Effects, which is a new GameWorks technology to render high quality grass that is able to interact with nearby objects. Also included are more well-known features, like HBAO+, high quality shadows, and god rays. Overall, there are a ton of settings that will give you total freedom to adjust the game to the visual fidelity you like, while still offering decent performance.

With the Ultra preset chosen, the game demands the best graphics hardware, even to play at a fluid 1080p HD. Only the GTX 1080, Titan X Pascal, and GTX 1080 Ti are able to achieve 60 FPS. When you go to 1440p, the GTX 1080 drops below 50 FPS, leaving only the Titan X Pascal and 1080 Ti with playable framerates. AMD Radeon GPUs deliver slightly below expected performance, possibly due to the inclusion of NVIDIA GameWorks Technology. Our graphics card review data suggests that the RX 480 is only a few percent behind the GTX 1060 6 GB when averaged over our whole benchmark suite, maybe even tying it in more recent games. For Ghost Recon Wildlands, the difference is closer to 10%.

We also tested the game using the Very High preset, which still delivers amazing graphics with much more reasonable framerates. Here, both the RX480 and GTX 1060 are able to deliver more than playable FPS for 1080p gaming.

In terms of gaming engine technology, it would have been nice to see a Vulkan or DirectX 12 renderer used, which could have potentially provided some performance benefits without sacrificing graphics, especially for AMD GPUs. It might have also helped fight the stuttering issue that many players are reporting. We noticed this issue being reported consistently in the first 2-3 minutes of gameplay, and even more so when driving a car, to the point where the game will "hang" every few seconds even on a system where the game files are installed on an SSD. On systems with a limited amount of RAM, for example 8 GB, stuttering might not go away until the game's graphics settings are reduced. VRAM usage, on the other hand, is quite reasonable for today's graphics cards, and FPS numbers will tank well before your VRAM becomes an issue, as the R9 Fury X data shows.

Overall, the game is a lot of fun, even though it becomes quite repetitive a few hour in because it lacks mission variety and so on. Co-op gameplay is a blast, especially when playing with friends and using voice chat. A few bugs are present too, but there's nothing game breaking - if you have the hardware to run it.