Well, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands came out last Tuesday and currently has a favorable (77) Metacritic score. I’ve been seeing a lot of people playing it and I have even take a little time to start checking it out. Beyond being a great looking game it is also relatively demanding as well. Combine all of that with a built-in benchmark tool that makes testing with it easier and more consistent I was interested in checking it out to see if it might have the potential to be added to our test suites. So rather than take Friday off like I had planned after the GTX 1080 Ti launch I spent the day testing a range of video cards in just about every test configuration to see how they perform. This way if we add the game we have a few cards already tested. Well, I figured I might as well share the results as well for anyone thinking about playing the game that way you know what settings you should be running depending on your card. So let's take a quick look at the results.
Title: Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands Performance Testing
Game Provided by: Nvidia
Written by: Wes
Amazon Link: HERE
It should be noted that Nvidia did give me the code for the game. I’m only taking a look though because it has the possibility of being a benchmark game in the future. I do take a quick look at the built-in Nvidia Ansel effects because they are awesome and I’ve never played with them before but that isn’t because they gave me the code. In fact, I tested the game so much because I was worried that the highly integrated Turf effects that come from Nvidia’s Gameworks SDK might cause unfair performance for AMD cards if I tested at the default Ultra setting.
Our Test Rig and Test Configuration
Before getting into the results I should make sure everyone knows how the testing was done. Below are the specs on our test bench. Wildlands rarely used more than 20%/25% of the CPU when testing but consistently pushed all of the video cards to 98/98%. This means you shouldn’t have to worry about our 5960X skewing the results too much for those who have slower CPUs.
Our Test Rig |
||
CPU |
Intel i7-5960X |
|
Memory |
Kingston HyperX FURY Black 32GB Quad Channel Kit 2666 MHz |
|
Motherboard |
Gigabyte X99-SOC Champion |
|
Cooling |
Noctua NH-U12S Cooler |
|
Power Supply |
Thermaltake 850w |
|
Storage |
Kingston Hyper X Savage 960GB SSD |
|
Case |
Dimastech Test Bench |
|
OS |
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit |
All of today's testing was done using the built in benchmark in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands. I tested at 1080p and 1440p for resolutions and at Ultra, Very High, High, and Medium detail settings as well as a special test at the Ultra setting without Turf Effects being turned on as it is part of Nvidia’s Gameworks SDK to see if AMD users are seeing a performance hit.