Ubisoft not happy with Ghost Recon Online’s CPU performance

Free-to-play Ghost Recon Online has been on general release for a few weeks now, and Ubisoft are still not completely happy with the way the game is performing on certain specifications of PC hardware.

One of the appeals of a free-to-play game is that it should be open to everyone; in terms of its low cost of entry, but also with the required hardware. For a monetisation model that often relies on high user numbers, having the game run on a wide range of hardware is an important element to success.

We recently spoke with Ghost Recon Online’s (GRO) lead designer Jesse Knapp who openly and honestly told us that the team are not happy with the way the game is performing on some computers.

“With a free to play game, we want as many people as possible to be able to play the game, competitively,” said Knapp. ” That means, from a design standpoint, we’ve always wanted to support as wide a range of hardware as possible.  Take laptops for instance, being able to play a game on your laptop just makes it so much more accessible.

“That said, we’ve also had a goal of making a HD game, which has its own cost.  I won’t lie, we aren’t happy with where we are right now, in terms of the performance, of what machines can really run GRO well.  But that’s the beauty of being a live gaming service – we are working everyday to improve GRO.”

Ghost Recon Online’s minimum desktop PC requirements are currently listed as follows:

• Operating System: Windows XP (with Service Pack 3) / Windows Vista (with Service Pack 2) / Windows 7 (with Service pack 1), both 32 bit & 64 bit versions
• Processor: Intel Pentium D 2.66 Ghz or AMD Athlon64 X2 3600+
• Memory: 2 GB Windows XP / 3 GB Windows Vista or Windows 7
• DirectX: DirectX 9.0c
• Graphic card: 256 MB DirectX-compliant, Shader Model 3.0-enabled video card
• Sound card: DirectX 9.0c – compliant sound card
• HDD: 6 GB of free disk space
• Peripherals: Keyboard, mouse
• Internet speed: 512kbps or higher (upstream and downstream)
• Internet browser: Internet Explorer 9 (Windows Vista/Windows 7) / Internet Explorer 8 (Windows XP)
• Framework: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

You can read more about Ghost Recon Online in our full review.