Tom Clancy's The Division 2 PC Performance Analysis | DSOGaming

Tom Clancy's The Division 2, Ubisoft's latest online roulette shooter, has just been released on PC. Powered by the Snowdrop engine, this new title seems to be the most optimized PC game proposed by Ubisoft in the last two years. As such, it's time now to compare it and see how it works on the PC platform.

For this PC performance analysis, we used an Intel i7 4930K processor (overclocked at 4.2 GHz) with 16 GB DDR3 RAM at 2133 MHz, AMD Radeon RX580 and RX Vega drivers, the RTX 2080Ti driver, GTX980Ti and GTX690 from AMD, the Windows 10 64-bit driver, GeForce 419.35 and the Radeon Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.3.2 software. NVIDIA has currently defined the game in single GPU mode in its latest drivers, which means that our GTX690 behaves the same as a single GTX680.

Massive Entertainment has added many graphical settings to edit. PC gamers can adjust the quality of shadows, spot shadows, spot shadows, contact shadows, particle details, volumetric fog, reflections, local reflections, vegetation, objects, ambient occlusion, extra streaming distance, water, terrain and projected texture resolution and there are also options for sharpness, chromatic aberration, thumbnail, high resolution sky textures, depth of field, parallax mapping, and sub-surface scattering. Unfortunately, and unlike other Ubisoft games, there are no additional details or on-screen demonstrations of each option.

The Division 2 comes with an integrated reference tool that is representative of the performance in the game. In addition, the game supports both DX11 and DX12 and, as we have already presented, DX12 is significantly faster than DX11. Therefore, we will use DX12 for our tests. For our CPU benchmarks, we also reduced our resolution to 1280 × 720 (to avoid any possible limitation of the GPU), while retaining the Ultra settings (some options affecting both the GPU and the CPU).

In order to know the performance of the game on different processors, we simulated a dual-core and quad-core processor. Without Hyper Threading, the game broke down in charge of our simulated dual-core system. Thanks to Hyper Threading technology, our simulated dual-core system was able to offer a minimum of 34 frames per second and an average of 48 frames per second (although there were stuttering while performing the reference). On the other hand, our simulated quad-core and six-core were able to run the game at over 60 frames per second. However, we have seen an increase in performance with Hyper Threading enabled on both our systems. As such, we strongly suggest to activate it for that particular title.

On the Ultra settings, The Division 2 is one of the most demanding PC games. Our AMD Radeon RX580 was not able to offer a smooth gaming experience in 1080p, and our NVIDIA GTX980Ti was not able to offer a consistent 60-fps experience at 2560 × 1440. Regarding 4K, our NVIDIA GeForce RTX2080Ti graphics card was not able to offer a smooth gaming experience. For owners of this GPU, we strongly suggest you reduce your resolution to 3325 × 1871. At 1871p, we were able to achieve a smooth gaming experience with a minimum of 62 frames per second and an average of 72 frames per second.

Fortunately, Division 2 is scalable and can be used on many PC configurations with its many graphical settings. While our NVIDIA RTX2080Ti was not able to offer a fluid gaming experience at 4K / Ultra, it was able to push a minimum of 64 frames per second and an average of 74 frames per second when we lowered our settings to High. On average settings, we found a gain of 10 fps and on low settings, we saw a further increase in performance of 20 fps.

Graphically, Division 2 is beautiful. As this is an open-world game, do not expect visual effects higher than those of linear games such as Devil May Cry 5. The lighting system and environments of The Division 2 have look great, but I was hoping to have better skin shaders and 3D models for the main characters (they are far from what we saw in Far Cry New Dawn for example). The destruction of the environment is limited and players can interact with some objects such as cans and traffic cones (better than nothing I guess), there are cool weather effects, there is a foldable grass , the reflections are excellent (Massive Entertainment used the reflections of space not as accurate as ray reflections), there is dynamic global lighting and volumetric lighting with superb divine rays. It's not a next generation experience, but Division 2 seems absolutely great for current standards.

In conclusion, Massive Entertainment has proposed an incredible PC version and it can safely be said that The Division 2 is one of the most optimized PC games of 2019. The game has many graphical parameters to modify and is scalable for a wide range PC configurations. . Plus, thanks to DX12, the game can take advantage of multiple processor cores. Some users reported crashes with DX12, but we did not meet them while playing (we noticed a few crashes when launching the game, however, everything was perfectly solid during the game). We also have no problems with mouse smoothing or acceleration, and the game works great with K & M!