The Division 2 – Mid-range graphics cards in the benchmark

Tom Clancy's The Division 2 was developed by Massive Entertainment and published by Ubisoft. It is the sequel to The Division, which saw the light of day three years earlier. Division 2 uses the Snowdrop engine and remains compatible with both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12, showing a preference for AMD hardware. Division 2 is available for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and, of course, pc. The following is a study of performance on a mid-range system with various mid-range graphics cards. In addition, the performance of high-end graphics cards on this system has been checked.

Benchmark scene

Division 2 has an integrated, rather well thought-out benchmark: it is divided into four parts, which alternate between reflective and vegetation-rich sequences and are in places highly geometry-heavy. This makes it an excellent benchmark sequence and is used accordingly.

Requirements

The game description in the Ubisoft Store shows various minimum configurations recommended by the publisher to play The Division 2. It should be noted, however, that the game can be satisfied with a relatively current graphics card, but at the same time shows a strong CPU dependency.

 

Test

Our test configuration corresponds to an up-to-date mid-range system. We chose an AMD Ryzen platform and a 1600X that has an excellent price-performance ratio. Monitoring the user configurations of Steam, currently the largest PC gaming platform, provides us with information (February 2019 figures) about player equipment.

• 8 GB of RAM use 38% of players (our configuration has 16 GB, like almost 33% of players).
• Full HD resolution is used by 62% of players, but 13% are still on the road in 1366 x 768. QHD affects less than 4% of players and 4K is still scarcely common. We will therefore test in Full HD and QHD.
• 4-core CPUs use 56% of users, but we still chose a 6-core processor.

We have selected nine graphics cards for this test. Mainly mid-range cards, which are potentially the most popular on the market. Also included is the new GeForce GTX 1660 Ti from Nvidia.

  

Test methodology

To ensure that the performance of the graphics cards is truly realistic, we take care to heat them before the measurement, so that there are no large frequency fluctuations in the benchmark and thus there is no quasi-falsification. This is especially important when the graphics card is cool and presents itself much more tactfully in the first few minutes.

Therefore, we let the maps reach their nominal operating temperature and then record their performance measurements during the test run. For the graphics options, we tested the game in Full HD and QHD with the high preset.

Graphics Options

In addition to the API to be used (DirectX 11 or 12), the quality of textures, terrain, vegetation, water, the level of detail of the particles or the quality of the volumetric fog and the ambient coverage can be adjusted. Fortunately, it is possible to select one of the four preconfigured settings (Low, Medium, High, Ultra).