Today, we are going to take a deep look at what the best graphic settings for Ghost Recon Breakpoint are, by running multiple benchmarks in 4K using the built in Benchmark tool. I will start by first setting a baseline benchmark to work with, which will be done with all settings at Ultra.
From here, each of the 15 individual graphic options within its Video Settings menu will be turned down to its lowest/off setting and benchmarked again, in order to determine how it influences performance.
This will allow us to then rank which individual Ghost Recon Breakpoint graphic settings are most resource intensive and tone those down slightly, in order to get the most visual detail for optimal trade off in frame per second (fps) performance.
Let’s begin.
Table of Contents
Ghost Recon Breakpoint Benchmark PC Setup
The Ghost Recon Breakpoint Benchmarks were done at 4K (3840 x 2160) resolution, using the following PC system specs:
- Graphics Card : Nvidia RTX 2070 Super ($525.44)
- CPU : AMD Ryzen 3700x ($205.00)
- RAM: Corsair CMW32GX4M2C3200C16 Vengeance RGB PRO 32GB ($111.19)
- Motherboard : Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro Wifi ($399.99)
- Storage Drive : Western Digital 8TB Ultrastar DC HC320 ($150.00)
- Recording Drive : Samsung 970 EVO SSD 1TB M.2 NVMe ($157.99)
- System Drive : Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB SATA ($139.00)
- Power Supply : EVGA SuperNOVA 750 G3 ($179.99)
- Monitor :
Samsung 49″ RU7300 – 4K Smart TV (DEPRECIATED)
PC Setup Extras
- Keyboard : Corsair K70 RGB MK.2 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard (Price not available)
- Keyboard Rubber O-Rings : Rosewill Mechanical Keyboard Rubber O-Rings (Price not available)
- Mouse : Corsair M65 Elite – FPS Gaming Mouse ($42.85)
- Gaming Controller : Microsoft Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 ($150.99)
- PC Case : Phanteks Eclipse P600S (Price not available)
- PC Case Fans : Corsair LL120 RGB, 120mm RGB LED Fan – Triple Pack ($69.99)
- PC Case RGB LED Strips : Speclux Computer Magnetic Addressable RGB LED Strip Kit ($16.99)
- PC Case RGB Controller : Corsair iCUE Commander PRO (Price not available)
- CPU Cooler : Cooler Master Hyper 212 RGB Black Edition CPU Air Cooler ($99.99)
Microphone : Rode NT1-A Anniversary Condenser Microphone (DEPRECIATED)- Microphone Stand : RODE PSA 1 Swivel Mount Studio Microphone Boom Arm ($98.50)
- Audio Interface Device : Steinberg UR22C 2×2 USB 3.0 Audio Interface ($194.99)
- Headphones : Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro 80 Limited Edition Black ($200.00)
- NVMe Expansion : ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIe 3.0 X4 Expansion Card V2 – 4x NVMe M.2 ($47.99)
- HDMI Switch : KVM 4K60p HDMI USB 4 Way Switch (Price not available)
- Stream Deck : Elgato 15 Key Stream Deck (No products found.)
- Monitor RGB LED Light Strips : GIDERWEL RGBW LED Strip Light,16.4ft SMD5050 ($15.99)
- RGB LED Light Strip Controller : GIDERWEL Home Smart Zigbee RGBCCT (Philips Hue Compatible) ($21.99)
- SATA Cables : 10 Pack 16 Inch SATA III 6.0 Gbps Cable (Price not available)
- Figurine (Storm Trooper) : Revoltech Star Wars Stormtrooper 6.7″ Action Figure ($181.64)
- Figurine (Darth Vader) : Revoltech Star Wars Darth Vader 6.7″ Action Figure ($63.36)
Ghost Recon Breakpoint DX11 Benchmarks
As mentioned above, let’s first get our base fps to compare all of the individual graphical settings to, which we will use the Ultra preset to do, as this turns everything to the highest possible setting, as well as turning off V-Sync.
I will be using the built in Ghost Recon Benchmark tool to do this, which can be found under your video settings menu.
Using DX11, the Ultra setting at 4K gave me 46fps, which is now our base point.
There are up to 17 individual graphic settings that can be tweaked within Ghost Recon Breakpoint, meaning a lot of benchmarking and a lot of elements to consider when trying to find the best settings.
Here are the benchmarking results in order of most performance gains, after turning each individual setting to its minimum or off value.
Game Video Setting | Ultra (max) | Low/Off | Percent Difference |
Ambient Occlusion | 46fps | 53fps | 7fps (15%) Gained |
Terrain Quality | 46fps | 52fps | 6fps (13%) Gained |
Texture Quality | 46fps | 51fps | 5fps (11%) Gained |
Screen Space Reflections | 46fps | 51fps | 5fps (11%) Gained |
Volumetric Fog | 46fps | 51fps | 5fps (11%) Gained |
Level of Detail | 46fps | 49fps | 3fps (7%) Gained |
Grass Quality | 46fps | 49fps | 3fps (7%) Gained |
Sun Shadows | 46fps | 49fps | 3fps (7%) Gained |
Anisotropic Filtering | 46fps | 48fps | 2fps (4%) Gained |
Sub-Surface Scattering | 46fps | 48fps | 2fps (4%) Gained |
Long Range Shadows | 46fps | 48fps | 2fps (4%) Gained |
Fog background Blur | 46fps | 48fps | 2fps (4%) Gained |
Screen Space Shadows | 46fps | 47fps | 1fps (2%) Gained |
Cloth Simulation | 46fps | 47fps | 1fps (2%) Gained |
Motion Blur & Bloom | 46fps | 46fps | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Temp Inj. & Anti Aliasing | 46fps | 33fps | -13fps (-28%) Lost |
Temporal Injection | 46fps | 32fps | -14fps (-30%) Lost |
Here we can see, Ambient Occlusion is the biggest performance hog out of the lot, with Terrain and Texture Quality following close behind.
Terrain and Texture Quality are also the biggest memory hungry settings. Terrain Quality requires 1236MB of RAM between its lowest and highest settings, while Texture Quality has a difference of 3343MB between its highest and lowest settings.
With my RTX 2070 Super and its 8GB of RAM, I was able to just squeeze in both at Ultra, with only a few hundred MB remaining. If you have a graphics card with less than 8GB of RAM, then you will be forced to turn these two down.
There are also two other settings above all of the above mentioned called Temporal Injection & Anti Aliasing. These should be left ON at all times, as turning them off, causes substantial loss in performance.
- Temporal Injection : 32fps, which is 14fps (30%) LESS than 46fps
- Temporal Injection & Anti Aliasing : 35fps, which is 34fps (28%) LESS than 46fps
Great, so now we know what settings are best to tweak in Ghost Recon Breakpoint!
Well, kind of, because there is actually a way to get even more performance out of the game, and that is by using VULKAN instead of DX11.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint VULKAN Benchmarks
As of the March 2020 update, Ghost Recon Breakpoint has implemented the game on the VULKAN API as well as DX11. VULKAN is an amazing API and am still confused as to why so little developers are making use of this technology. DOOM and DOOM Eternal have shown just how incredible VULKAN is allowing for insane fps performance when using it compared to DirectX in these games.
While the gains in Ghost Recon Breakpoint aren’t as substantial as in DOOM they certainly are greater, and every little bit helps. In order to make use of VULKAN, you need to select it when launching the game from the Uplay Launcher.
VULKAN also recently announced its implementation of Raytracing into its API so things are going to get even better with this technology in the near future.
Let’s take a look at the Ghost Recon Breakpoint benchmarks using VULKAN.
Once again I ran the benchmark using all Ultra settings, to establish our base figure,which this time reached 50fps (instead of 46fps with DX 11). I will show you a comparison between DX11 and Vulkan in just a bit, but let’s quickly see what settings are best to turn down in order to get the best performance.
Game Video Setting | Ultra (max) | Low/Off | Percent Difference |
Ambient Occlusion | 50fps | 56fps | 6fps (12%) Gained |
Terrain Quality | 50fps | 56fps | 6fps (12%) Gained |
Screen Space Reflections | 50fps | 55fps | 5fps (10%) Gained |
Volumetric Fog | 50fps | 54fps | 4fps (8%) Gained |
Texture Quality | 50fps | 53fps | 3fps (6%) Gained |
Grass Quality | 50fps | 53fps | 3fps (6%) Gained |
Motion Blur & Bloom | 50fps | 53fps | 3fps (6%) Gained |
Sun Shadows | 50fps | 52fps | 2fps (4%) Gained |
Level of Detail | 50fps | 51fps | 1fps (2%) Gained |
Cloth Simulation | 50fps | 51fps | 1fps (2%) Gained |
Sub-Surface Scattering | 50fps | 51fps | 1fps (2%) Gained |
Anisotropic Filtering | 50fps | 50fps | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Screen Space Shadows | 50fps | 50fps | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Long Range Shadows | 50fps | 49fps | -1fps (-2%) Lost |
Fog background Blur | 50fps | 49fps | -1fps (-2%) Lost |
Temp Inj. & Anti Aliasing | 50fps | 35fps | -15fps (-30%) Lost |
Temporal Injection | 50fps | 34fps | -16fps (-32%) Lost |
The order of the results are pretty similar to DX11, except for Motion Blur, Bloom and Cloth Simulations, which seem to be more resource intensive when using VULKAN instead of DX11, moving them from the bottom to the mid range results.
For some reason Long Range Shadows and Fog Background Blur on their lowest settings performed every so slightly worse than the Ultra setting, which is weird, but could just be written off a margin of error.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint DX11 vs VULKAN Benchmarks
Alright, so now that we know what the best settings are to tune, in both DX11 and VULKAN in Ghost Recon Breakpoint, let’s quickly take a look at how much performance gains you will get by using VULKAN over DX11.
Game Video Setting | DX 11 | VULKAN | Percent Difference |
Motion Blur & Bloom | 46fps | 53fps | 7fps (15%) Gained |
Cloth Simulation | 47fps | 51fps | 4fps (9%) Gained |
Grass Quality | 49fps | 53fps | 4fps (8%) Gained |
Screen Space Reflections | 51fps | 55fps | 4fps (8%) Gained |
Terrain Quality | 52fps | 56fps | 4fps (8%) Gained |
Screen Space Shadows | 47fps | 50fps | 3fps (6%) Gained |
Sub-Surface Scattering | 48fps | 51fps | 3fps (6%) Gained |
Temporal Injection | 32fps | 34fps | 2fps (6%) Gained |
Sun Shadows | 49fps | 52fps | 3fps (6%) Gained |
Temp Inj. & Anti Aliasing | 33fps | 35fps | 2fps (6%) Gained |
Volumetric Fog | 51fps | 54fps | 3fps (6%) Gained |
Ambient Occlusion | 53fps | 56fps | 3fps (6%) Gained |
Anisotropic Filtering | 48fps | 50fps | 2fps (4%) Gained |
Level of Detail | 49fps | 51fps | 2fps (4%) Gained |
Texture Quality | 51fps | 53fps | 2fps (4%) Gained |
Long Range Shadows | 48fps | 49fps | 1fps (2%) Gained |
Fog background Blur | 48fps | 49fps | 1fps (2%) Gained |
This gave us an average of a 6.23% increase when using VULKAN when averaging all 17 settings and a 9% increase when comparing the two Ultra Presets benchmarks.
So while it’s nothing as groundbreaking as in DOOM, it certainly does edge us just a little bit closer to that 60fps we are wanting to achieve in 4K.
Things do however get a lot better when we start using the built in Video Presets when benchmarking.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint Vsync Benchmarks
One thing that I noticed while doing these benchmarks, is that V-Sync actually plays a very big part in frame per second performance, when turning it off, as compared to on.
Take a look at these benchmark results using all 5 preset graphic settings in Ghost Recon Breakpoint.
As you can clearly see for this graph chart, by disabling V-Sync, you gain you a massive amount of performance gains in both DX11 and VULKAN, although VULKAN really seems to shine when V-Sync is turned ON compared to DX11.
Video Graphic Preset | DX 11 | VULKAN | Percent Difference |
VERY HIGH (V-Sync ON) | 37fps | 56fps | 19fps (51%) Gained |
ULTRA (V-Sync ON) | 33fps | 48fps | 15fps (45%) Gained |
HIGH (V-Sync ON) | 46fps | 60fps | 14fps (30%) Gained |
HIGH (V-Sync OFF) | 62fps | 71fps | 9fps (15%) Gained |
MEDIUM (V-Sync OFF) | 66fps | 75fps | 9fps (14%) Gained |
MEDIUM (V-Sync ON) | 53fps | 60fps | 7fps (13%) Gained |
LOW (V-Sync OFF) | 78fps | 88fps | 10fps (13%) Gained |
VERY HIGH (V-Sync OFF) | 54fps | 60fps | 6fps (11%) Gained |
ULTRA (V-Sync OFF) | 46fps | 50fps | 4fps (9%) Gained |
LOW (V-Sync ON) | 60fps | 60fps | 0fps (0%) Gained |
The top 3 biggest gains in performance are all with V-Sync on, as VULKAN demolishes DX11. These three wins, also happen to be the most intense presets, being High (30% increase), Very High (51% increase) and Ultra (45% increase).
Thanks to VULKAN’s enhanced performance, I was able to achieve my sweet spot goal of 60fps with V-Sync OFF, using the Very High Preset, (which is just below Ultra, so nothing shabby at all) and 56fps when turning it ON.
Where as compared to DX11, I could only pull off 54fps with V-Sync OFF and a measly 37fps with V-Sync ON, giving VULKAN a whopping 51% gain over DX11 with V-Sync ON.
Taking a closer look at the individual benchmarks for each API, we can see the significant difference in performance when turning V-Sync off. I must admit I was quite blown away by these results as I never thought V-Sync had such a significant impact on performance, as I have always played all my games with it on.
I will now have to rethink this choice.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint – DX11 (V-Sync ON vs OFF)
To get a better idea of how V-Sync influence performance, lets compare it some benchmarks with it enabled and disabled, in both DX11 and VULKAN.
Using DX11, the ‘Low Preset’ capped out its potential performance at 60fps, as it managed to gain 78fps with V-Sync off, while the Medium Preset achieved 66fps.
Everything from here onwards wasn’t able to get to the magical 60fps using DX11 and V-Sync turned on. Even the ‘Medium Preset’ could only deliver 53fps, with ‘High Preset’ at 46fps, ‘Very High Preset’ at 37fps and ‘Ultra Preset’ at 33fps.
Turning V-Sync Off gave much better results, but with only the ‘High Preset’ able to just nudge itself over the 60fps mark with 62fps, while the ‘Very High Preset’ and ‘Ultra Preset’, were left well below our goal mark.
Rather disappointing, so let’s see what VULKAN can bring to the table instead.
However, looking at the three DLSS ON benchmarks, DLSS 2.0 followed the same pattern as the previous results, falling behind the DLSS 1.0.
Although, due to this not being and overclocked benchmark, the difference was far less, being only 3 frames for DLSS Performance, 2 frames for DLSS Balanced and 1 frame for DLSS Quality.
Very interesting how an overclocked effected the results between DLSS 1.0 and DLSS 2.0.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint – VULKAN (V-Sync ON vs OFF)
VULKAN gave a significant boost over DX11, allowing ‘Low’, ‘Medium’ and ‘High Presets’ to reach their 60fps cap quite easily, while with V-Sync off.
The ‘Low Preset’ delivered 88fps, ‘Medium Preset’ delivered 75fps and ‘High Preset’ delivered 71 fps, while as I mentioned earlier, the’ Very High Preset’ also managed to just achieve 60fps with V-Sync off.
These results clearly show us the big performance boost, that we can not only get from using VULKAN, but also by turning V-Sync off in Ghost Recon Breakpoint.
This only left the ‘Ultra Preset’ short of the magic 60fps, but by only 10fps, which we can most likely achieve with an overclock, so let’s do that and see what we get.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint - VULKAN Overclock Benchmarks
Overclocking my RTX 2070 Super is simple using MSI Afterburner with the following settings:
- Power limit : 120%
- Temp Limit : 88°C
- Core Clock +120Mhz
- Memory Clock : +800MHZ
With the Overclock enabled, I ran the Ghost Recon benchmarks again using the same built in presets.
Here we can see a very nice improvement in our previous stock VULKAN benchmarks, with each preset gaining quite a bit of extra frames per second with V-Sync disabled
By enabling V-Sync again, I was able to cap 4 of the presets to 60fps, including ‘Low’, ‘Medium’, ‘High’ and ‘Very High’, whereas without the overclock, ‘Very High’ fell just short at 56fps.
Looking at the ‘Ultra’ benchmark results, we gained a nice 5fps with the overclock, leaving us only 5fps short of 60fps. Therefore, any graphics card better than a RTX 2070 Super will definitely reward you with 60fps at 4K with all settings on Ultra.
Not too shabby, well done Vulkan!
Video Quality Preset | VULKAN | VULKAN OC | Percent Difference |
ULTRA (V-Sync ON) | 48fps | 54fps | 6fps (13%) Gained |
VERY HIGH (V-Sync OFF) | 60fps | 66fps | 6fps (10%) Gained |
ULTRA (V-Sync OFF) | 50fps | 55fps | 5fps (10%) Gained |
LOW (V-Sync OFF) | 88fps | 96fps | 8fps (9%) Gained |
HIGH (V-Sync OFF) | 71fps | 77fps | 6fps (8%) Gained |
VERY HIGH (V-Sync ON) | 56fps | 60fps | 4fps (7%) Gained |
MEDIUM (V-Sync OFF) | 75fps | 80fps | 5fps (7%) Gained |
LOW (V-Sync ON) | 60fps | 60fps | 0fps (0%) Gained |
MEDIUM (V-Sync ON) | 60fps | 60fps | 0fps (0%) Gained |
HIGH (V-Sync ON) | 60fps | 60fps | 0fps (0%) Gained |
The table above shows us which preset gained the most performance with the RTX 2070 Super Overclock enabled vs the stock settings.
Surprisingly enough, our ‘Ultra Preset’ with V-Sync ON, gained the most with a very solid 6fps (13%) increase, followed by ‘Very High’ with V-Sync OFF with a 6fps (10%) increase.
Best Ghost Recon Graphic Settings Conclusion
I hope you guys enjoyed this article on finding the Best Graphic Settings for Ghost Recon Breakpoint, I had a lot of fun making it.
From the results, we can deduce that you should first and foremost say a whole-hearty goodbye to DX11 and run the Game on Vulkan instead, espeically with Vulkan receviing Ryatraacin. This API is going to cause some serious dents to DX12.
Raytracing would make games like Ghost Recon Breakpoint even more visually stunning and cannot wait for that day to become a reality.
Next you should definitely give your graphics card a small overclock, MSI Afterburner makes this very easy to do, gaining you at least another 10% on average in performance.
I would then use the built in benchmark tool to run tests on some of the presets, in order to find a sweet spot for your graphics card, as I feel they are very well optimized.
Lastly you can tone down the 3 biggest resource hungry culprits being Ambient Occlusion, Terrain Quality and Screen Space Reflections, to gain a few extra fps.
Remember that if you have less than 8GB of RAM, then you need to definitely tune down Terrain Quality and especially Texture Quality, as they use the most memory.
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Happy Gaming
Ozarc (¬‿¬)