The Division 2 in the technology test

– The Division 2 presents a beautiful but dilapidated Washington. The test of the game with various graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia shows that DirectX 12 runs significantly rounder than DirectX 11. The requirements for the GPU are also high with the low-level API.

Washington neglected in detail

The Division 2 takes the action multiplayer game from Ubisoft to Washington DC. Instead of snow, there are summer temperatures, significantly more variety in the area and many well-known, but dilapidated buildings and sights. The Division 2 has remained the same, but the developer Massive Entertainment has done a lot of fine tuning.

You could say exactly the same thing about technology. At its core, Ubisoft's in-house and the latest Engine Snowdrop, which premiered in The Division (Test), is still used. There have also been many minor improvements in technology. In combination with the new and yet much more varied environment, the look is successful.

The Division 2 looks good, even if the graphics do not set new standards. The engine seems to be able to do some things well (for example, displaying external environments in sunlight), while others are not so good. For example, some buildings are less beautiful on the inside, and bad weather with rain and fog looks unimpressive. The LOD also works well in places and lets objects pop out of nowhere. The good sides definitely have the upper hand.

Above all, the richness of detail is impressive. The neglected Washington DC was obviously implemented with a lot of love, there is an incredible amount to see. A special highlight are the well-known buildings such as the White House, which has been implemented optically great. It is also impressive how many objects can be seen on the screen at times in places.

The Division 2 comes with AMD technology

The Division was implemented with the support of Nvidia. The Division 2 has literally made a U-turn because the PC version was developed in collaboration with AMD. For example, the hair of some protagonists looks very much like AMD's TressFX variant. In addition, the game offers the “Shader Intrinsics” exclusive to AMD GCN for better performance. AMD has not released any further information.

Processor benchmarks from The Division 2 including a comparison of DirectX 11 with DirectX 12 will be submitted later this week.

Due to the high effort involved in benchmarking, which in particular depends on the time of day and weather changes, BitcoinMinersHashrate refrains from calling the benchmark to the community in this case. If you feel like it, you will still find the information you need to create comparable measurement results on the following page.

Lots of graphics options and some highlights

Ubisoft has been the "king of the option menus" of the PC versions for several months and The Division 2 also has a heavy caliber. To get started quickly, there are four different graphics presets with "Low", "Medium", "High" and "Ultra", which change numerous graphics options with one click to adapt the performance to your own computer.

"Ultra" is not yet the maximum. The shadows and reflections can be rotated another step higher. As a result, the shadows (even at a greater distance) are displayed in more detail, which is not the case with the ultra preset. Interestingly, more details are also shown at a great distance, although this shouldn't actually happen based on the description of the options.

If you switch back to the "High" level, you have to be satisfied with fewer details at a greater distance. In addition, the shadows become harder and the reflections less. The biggest disadvantage can only be seen in motion, because then the LOD works much more aggressively, so that objects in front of the player keep building up in motion. This effect then increases even more on "Medium" and the visibility decreases again. Reflections also decrease again and the textures show less details. With the low preset, the game becomes ugly because the visibility is reduced enormously. If possible, the preset should not be used. "High" is advisable.

The snowdrop engine in The Division 2 shows very good scalability, each preset brings a decent boost of performance. Compared to the ultra preset, the full graphics details cost 14 percent of FPS on a Radeon RX Vega 64, and 15 percent on a GeForce RTX 2070. If you switch back to "High", you will receive a further 31 and 32 percent respectively, and "Medium" will bring you 30 and 29 percent more performance. Compared to the maximum setting, "Medium" runs almost twice as fast on AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. The low preset then vastly improves performance with a plus of 66 percent on a Radeon and 70 percent on a GeForce. However, the quality of the display decreases just as strongly.

Frame limiters, explanations and more

In the graphics menu, there is an explanation for each option as to what it does. Unfortunately, there are no sample screenshots available in other Ubisoft games like Far Cry New Dawn (test).

In The Division 2 there are also options that are not the rule. In the PC version, for example, the game offers a switch called "latency reduction". This is active by default and is intended to reduce input latency. However, this should lead to performance problems. However, there were no problems with the option during the test, so it should be enabled.

Between 20 and 200 FPS, the PC version of The Division 2 offers an FPS limiter that can be configured in 5 FPS steps. In addition, there is in-game upsampling, which reduces the internal resolution to 50 percent, 75 percent or 85 percent of the set resolution. This is useful if the performance is not sufficient for the monitor's native resolution. However, there is no downsampling, i.e. an internally rendered resolution.

The Division 2 works with post-processing anti-aliasing including a temporal component. This cannot be switched on or off, so it is also unclear which technology is exactly behind it. However, the option to switch off is not absolutely necessary, because anti-aliasing works well in The Division 2. Even in low resolutions like Full HD there is only minimal blurring and still the picture is pleasantly calm. All of the vegetation, and there's a lot of that in the game, doesn't flicker at all. A few objects, on the other hand, are inexplicably barely or not at all detected by the anti-aliasing and then still flicker clearly in "Ultra HD". However, the problem rarely occurs.

The Division 2 supports DirectX 12

Finally, The Division 2 also supports DirectX 12. The options menu offers the choice to switch between DX11 and DX12. DirectX 11 is activated by default. In one of the next sections, BitcoinMinersHashrate examines the differences between the two APIs.

On the next page: test series, test system and graphics settings