Ghost Recon Breakpoint doubles performance on next-gen consoles

The new console generation has so far been amazing for players who love smooth, 60 frames per second gaming. Ubisoft, especially, leads the charge with the likes of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, The Division 2, and Immortals Fenyx Rising – all come fully equipped with at least a performance option, or run at 60fps by default on Xbox Series X, Series S and PS5. We can add another to the list here too: Ghost Recon Breakpoint. It was patched around next-gen’s launch, and while running in backwards compatibility mode, the doubling of frame-rate is a game-changing experience. The Division 2 tried the same trick but came unstuck somewhat on PS5, missing some visual flourishes found in every other version – even PS4 Pro. Speaking of which, there’s good news with The Division 2 here worth touching on before we get into Breakpoint properly.

The Division 2’s Patch 1.31 (as it appears on the PS5 front-end) came out hot on the heels of our coverage and essentially sorts out all of the issues we had with it – namely, screen-space reflections and volumetric fog are back. Looking back, this was likely an oversight from developer Massive Entertainment at the time; a simple flag for these settings that went unchecked. However, it’s clear that legacy limitations from PS4 Pro are still in place – there’s a vanishingly small performance advantage here opposite Xbox Series X, but it comes at the cost of a lower resolution on PS5. All is well, where the big success remains that next-gen can now achieve 60fps – a similar story to Ghost Recon Breakpoint.

As a successor to Ghost Recon Wildlands, Breakpoint had serious ambition at release. There are flashes of the big sandbox jungles in Crysis or Far Cry here. Physics for mud are stand-out too, and there’s just an incredible sense of freedom to exploring the island – densely packed as it is with woodlands, vehicles and secret coves, time of day changes and weather states. But as was so often the case on last-gen, a big complex world like this only ran at 30 frames per second. We had two modes – for graphics and resolution – but both shared a 30fps cap. The situation changes up for next-gen: PS5 runs the resolution mode at a 1440p, while Series X delivers it at 4K even though both are touted as offering up ultra HD support. Both are equipped with dynamic resolution scaling support but spend most of the time at these top-end limits. The actual visual make-up of the two seems identical by and large – though Series X’s hardware-enforced 16x anisotropic filtering isn’t matched on the Sony machine. Curiously, Series S only has a single mode, and it runs at 1440p30 just like PS5’s resolution mode, putting the pixel count limit on the Sony console into perspective.

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