Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, Ubisoft’s latest online looter shooter, has just been released on the PC. Powered by the Snowdrop Engine, this new title appears to be the most optimized PC game that Ubisoft has offered these past couple of years. As such, it’s time now to benchmark it and see how it performs on the PC platform.
For this PC Performance Analysis, we used an Intel i7 4930K (overclocked at 4.2Ghz) with 16GB of DDR3 RAM at 2133Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX580 and RX Vega 64, NVIDIA’s RTX 2080Ti, GTX980Ti and GTX690, Windows 10 64-bit, GeForce driver 419.35 and the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.3.2. NVIDIA has currently set the game on Single GPU mode in its latest drivers, meaning that our GTX690 behaved similarly to a single GTX680.
Massive Entertainment has added numerous graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Shadows, Spot Shadows, Spot Shadow Resolution, Contact Shadows, Particle Detail, Volumetric Fog, Reflections, Local Reflections, Vegetation, Object Detail, Ambient Occlusion, Extra Streaming Distance, Water, Terrain and Projected Texture Resolution, and there are also options for Sharpening, Chromatic Aberration, Vignette, High Resolution Sky Textures, Depth of Field, Parallax Mapping and Sub-surface Scattering. Unfortunately, and contrary to other Ubisoft games, there aren’t any additional details and on-screen demonstrations about each and every option.
The Division 2 comes with a built-in benchmark tool that is representative of the in-game performance. Moreover, the game supports both DX11 and DX12 and as we’ve already showcased, DX12 runs significantly faster than DX11. Therefore, we’ll be using DX12 for our benchmarks. For our CPU benchmarks we’ve also reduced our resolution to 1280×720 (so we could avoid any possible GPU limitation) but kept using the Ultra settings (as some options affect both the GPU and the CPU).
In order to find out how the game performs on a variety of CPUs, we simulated a dual-core and a quad-core CPU. Without Hyper Threading, the game was crashing on load on our simulated dual-core system. With Hyper Threading enabled, our simulated dual-core system was able to offer a minimum of 34fps and an average of 48fps (though there were noticeable stutters while running the benchmark). On the other hand, our six-core and simulated quad-core were able to run the game with more than 60fps, however we noticed a performance increase with Hyper Threading enabled on both of our systems. As such, we strongly suggest enabling it for this particular title.
On Ultra settings, The Division 2 is one of the most demanding PC games. Our AMD Radeon RX580 was unable to offer a smooth gaming experience at 1080p, and our NVIDIA GTX980Ti was not able to push a constant 60fps experience at 2560×1440. As for 4K, our NVIDIA GeForce RTX2080Ti was unable to offer a smooth gaming experience. For owners of this particular GPU, we strongly suggest lowering your resolution to 3325×1871. At 1871p we were able to get a smooth gaming experience with a minimum of 62fps and an average of 72fps.
Thankfully, The Division 2 is scalable and can be enjoyed on a wide range of PC configurations thanks to its numerous graphics settings. While our NVIDIA RTX2080Ti was unable to offer a smooth gaming experience at 4K/Ultra, it was able to push a minimum of 64fps and an average of 74fps when we lowered our settings to High. On Medium settings, we saw a 10fps gain and on Low settings we witnessed an additional 20fps performance increase.
Graphics wise, The Division 2 looks beautiful. Since this is an open-world game, you should not expect visuals that can beat those found in linear games such as Devil May Cry 5. The lighting system and the environments in The Division 2 look great, though I was kind of expecting better skin shaders and 3D models for the main characters (they are nowhere close to what we’ve witnessed in Far Cry New Dawn for example). There is limited environmental destruction and players can interact with some objects like cans and traffic cones (better than nothing I guess), there are some cool weather effects, there is bendable grass, reflections are great (Massive Entertainment has used screen space reflections so they are not as accurate as ray-traced reflections), there is dynamic global illumination and volumetric lighting with some gorgeous God rays. It’s not a next-gen experience but The Division 2 looks absolutely great for today’s standards.
In conclusion, Massive Entertainment has offered an incredible PC version and we can safely say that The Division 2 is one of the most optimized PC games of 2019. The game comes with numerous graphics settings to tweak and is scalable on a wide range of PC configurations. Moreover, and thanks to DX12, the game can properly take advantage of multiple CPU cores. Some users reported crashes with DX12, however we did not experience them while playing the game (we did notice some crashes while launching the game, however, everything was rock solid while playing). We also did not experience any mouse smoothing or acceleration issues, and the game plays great with K&M!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Good to know it runs great on PC. Will pick it up after 2 years when its 75% off.
Optimisation is great 😀 (look at 4k with Vega LC)
Tested with ZEN 2700X.
http://i67.tinypic.com/120nskg.jpg
Wow VEGA really has aged well
This game is NOT “one of the most demanding PC games”.
I can immediately think of 5 other games that are significantly less performant than this title. For anyone concerned, this game is very well optimized for PC considering its graphical fidelity, and most of the individual graphic options provide significant improvements in performance when lowered.
I played the beta, I didn’t think it ran that well. It looks pretty good, but the performance I was getting didn’t justify the framerates I was seeing.
At least the CPU scaling is quite good.
The final game runs much better than the betas, especially when using DirectX 12 (which doesn’t crash anymore on my system as in the betas).
Obviously you’ll need a good PC to run the game at maximum graphics settings. With my rig (AMD Ryzen 2700X CPU + 16 GB PC3000 DDR4 RAM + NVidia GTX 1080Ti GPU + Samsung 830 SSD), the game runs at 1440p with more than 60 fps with maximum graphics settings (better than ultra which has not all maxxed settings) and DirectX 12.
I think the devs have worked very well with the optimization on this title.
That’s good to hear. I’ll likely pick it up eventually, but not before I finish DMC5 and Sekiro when that lands.
I mostly enjoyed the original and this one seemed like an improvement in pretty much every area.
Kudos to the devs at MASSIVE for doing a massively good job
geforce fx 5200 benchmarks when?
John please, are you going to change AB osd preset to colored modern ever or is it still 1996 ?..just do it
Wish i could go back to 1996 hardware was more fun then
Game is running very well on my end. 4770K / RX 590 😀
Not saying this as a hater or anything but why on earth did you get a the 590? Why not just get a 580 and OC?
An Epic Store and Uplay joint exclusive whereby they’ve acted to bar key vendors from selling it. That’s the only performance analysis I need to know.
Valve’s response to Epic Games spying:
“We are looking into what information the Epic launcher collects from Steam.
The Steam Client locally saves data such as the list of games you own, your friends list and saved login tokens (similar to information stored in web browser cookies). This is private user data, stored on the user’s home machine and is not intended to be used by other programs or uploaded to any 3rd party service.
Interested users can find localconfig.vdf and other Steam configuration files in their Steam Client’s installation directory and open them in a text editor to see what data is contained in these files. They can also view all data related to their Steam account at: https://help.steampowered.com/en/accountdata.”
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/epic-promises-to-fix-game-launcher-after-privacy-concerns/
I wonder why my 1070ti runs at 20% only on 1440p high. And 8086k runs at 30% only.
Shouldn’t atleast GPU go near 100% since i believe it’s my bottleneck for TD2?
I get anything between 50 and 80 fps on DX12
Could be also Windows task manager bug
Metalmessiah? 😀
If you have vsync on or an FPS limiter, the gpu and cpu will only use as much resources as needed just to hit that FPS target and nothing more. This saves energy and produces less heat. I’d also recommend using MSI Afterburner to track usage of GPU.
Yea i know, it was just a windows task manager bug, hardware monitor shows 100% usage on GPU
It would be really great if you could buy a 9900K, so we could see benefits of 8C/16T (if any) and more importantly 8C/8T vs 6C/12T (in other words 8700K vs 9700K). Also what min fps means ? is it just the minimum (pretty useless) or 99th percentile (much better).
Well if you’re still stuck in 1997 and gaming at such a low resolution then there’s probably going to be a small difference as the gpu becomes useless, but then again you could just run cinebench to get an accurate cpu result and then use some basic logic to predict the results in FPS, you didn’t need a gaming benchmark to tell you this. Also gaming in 2K and 4K AKA real world, there’s probably going to be a 1 to 2 fps difference between 4 cores vs 12 cores at 10Ghz as the cpu becomes useless. What you really want to see is the difference in core and thread optimization, so we basically know how well the game is optimized rather than the information we already know.
I’m getting 70 fps on ultra 3440×1440 with a gtx 1080ti and i5 9600k