Performance & Impressions
Introduction
A first for a peoples review today, we will be taking a look at the beta of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint analysing performance and I’ll be giving my thoughts on how the beta is shaping up. Well that’s it for this introduction so let’s dig in and see what’s on offer.
First Impressions
I’ve logged a good 8 hours in Breakpoint now exploring what this beta has to offer, overall, and to my surprise, it has been both quite polished and rather enjoyable with no serious bugs to speak of just a few minor ones such as some NPCs standing on tables and your character appearance not always updating to visually display newly equipped apparel (weapons are fine). The most serious bug I encountered had my character stuck in terrain after resting at a camp location which required me to fast travel to get unstuck. The world of Breakpoint is also surprisingly appealing to look at with draw distances being absolutely massive I’ve not seen any pop-in or LOD switching the devs should be applauded for this but there are some areas that still need addressing such as you will quite frequently be in a nice environment only to have it all ruined by something using a horribly low resolution texture, helicopter carcasses in particular are repeat offenders and the dirt bike texture could do with some work it looks very basic lacking detail and thus far too “clean”.
Likely the worst immersion breaker is the character models themselves skin textures make them all look like they are made of plastic and a lot of the apparel does not look like clothing but rather has a kind of plastic shine to it, your old Action Man figures are more realistic looking than these models. Gameplay and combat I’ve found to be very solid in general but pick your place right and the witless idiots that pass as the AI in this game will all funnel toward you and you can wipe out almost an entire base without moving. Story missions could do with some more clearly defined structure as when you are out and about in the world you can easily completely lose track of these missions as they follow the same principle as side missions which have you gathering tiny bits of intel before the mission endgame reveals itself, it’s quite monotonous. Free roam is a different story (bad pun intended) you’ll often find little things to keep you interested and let’s just say some of the enemy drones you will encounter will most likely completely boss you and you’ll realise as tough and good as you thought you were you need more skills and / or firepower to bring them down. Driving was decent enough although most vehicles feel like you’re driving them on a sheet of ice, the slower vehicles aren’t too bad and the dirt bike is surprisingly grippy despite the speed it has. The one thing that did consistently, every time, piss me off though were NPCs that somehow have the ability to shoot you from considerable distance with pin point accuracy using a rocket launcher and this included more than a few instances of killing me through solid walls and making this worse still is you really don’t have a lot of time to get out the blast zone regardless of distance, 3-5 seconds or so I’d say.
Performance & Test System
Now for the meat and potatoes, how does the game run? The usual test system was used and performance data was gathered from the Holmwood Mangrove area.
CPU: AMD Zen 1700 @ 3.9GHz
Mainboard: MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon
RAM: 2x8GB G.Skill Ripjaws V 3200MHz @ 3466MHz CL16
GPU: Sapphire Nitro+ RX580 8GB @ 1.425GHz, 2.2GHz (8800 effective), custom optimised timings
Storage: 250GB Hynix SL301 SATA SSD, WD 120GB M.2 SATA SSD (OS drive), 2TB Seagate Barracuda
Opticals: 24x Lite-On iHAS324 DVD-RW, 16x HP BH40N Blu-Ray
Sound: Xonar DX 7.1, Realtek ALC1220
PSU: EVGA 1000w Supernova G2
OS: Windows 10 Pro x64 1709
Case: NZXT Phantom 530
Drivers:
AMD Chipset Drivers v18.10.0830
Realtek Audio Driver v6.0.1.8619
Xonar C-Media 1825 Driver
Adrenalin(e) 19.9.1
For a beta this performance at 1080p surprised me it’s nice to see the devs have obviously focused on optimisation though and even in the beta state will run pretty smoothly on most hardware.
Conclusion
My final impressions are ones of being a bit mixed for Breakpoint, overall fun but not without flaws that are hopefully addressed before launch and it is worth remembering Breakpoint will have an in-game store to use real money to purchase from by the looks of it if that is the case who knows how that will affect the in-game economy currently it is pretty good but you just know that store will require the devs to do... “rebalancing” for the final release to “encourage” real money spending. Any game with an in-game store you can spend real money in after already paying AAA prices for the game automatically loses points with me thus I’d say wait until the games first discount at least, you stand to gain much more by doing so.