Tom Clancy’s The Division PC Performance Review

Conclusion

In recent years PC gamers have come to expect very little from Ubisoft, with recent disasters like Assassin’s Creed Unity and Watch Dogs still being very painful memories in the minds of PC gamers. Thankfully Massive have managed to avoid the trend of terrible Ubisoft PC games and have managed to release a game that has not only proved stable for my entire time playing the game but also performs very well on both AMD and Nvidia hardware. 

One thing that can be learned from this is that it is always best to leave the development of the PC version of a AAA PC game to the original developers, rather than leaving it to a 3rd party at the last minute like recent Assassin’s Creed games and the Batman: Arkham Knight PC port. This game not only performs very well on PC but is easily one of the best performing AAA games of recent years, being able to be played with 60+ FPS framerates on a range of GPUs but also performs well regardless of who has manufactured your GPU. 

We can see in this game that the SnowDrop Engine is capable of some really good game performance considering how graphically intense this game is, providing the most in depth graphical options menu that we have ever seen in a PC game and arguably the best visuals that we have ever seen in a game, especially when it comes to reflections and shadow quality. 

When the console versions of this game are only able to run at 1080p 30 FPS it is great to be able to achieve framerates of higher than 60 with even a mid-range setup, with 4K 30+ FPS gameplay being easily possible being easily possible when using today’s high end GPUs.  

Hopefully in the future we will be seeing more PC games that perform like The Division in the future, lacking any major performance issues at launch and being very playable on on a wide range of GPU hardware. The only fault with the game that we can really level at it from a PC performance standpoint is the fact that the built in performance benchmark does not provide us with a accurate minimum framerate, at least when compared with actual gameplay, though this is a minor complaint. 

The Division represents a lot of what PC game developers should be aiming towards, offering a PC version of a game that has a detailed graphical options menu, plays well on both AMD and Nvidia hardware and has no major graphical or performance issues at launch.

Massive Games should be very proud of what they have achieved with The Division, offering great performance for the graphics on offer and providing us with a PC version that is arguably the best PC versions of a game to ever come out of a developer, especially considering the fact that this is a Ubisoft published game. 

 

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