The Division 2 PC Performance Review

CPU Performance – DirectX 11 VS DirectX 12 & Core Scaling

When developing The Division 2, one of Massive Entertainment’s goals was to increase the multi-threading capabilities of their engine and exploit the new wave of high core count processors that have hit the gaming market. 

On PC, it is now not uncommon to see new gaming builds offer six or more cores, with AMD’s Ryzen 5 2600 series proving highly popular in today’s market. Thanks to their partnership with AMD, The Division 2 offers optimisations for the company’s latest Ryzen processors, both with and without DirectX 12, though the newer API offers advantages when it comes to CPU Multi-threading. 

DirectX 11

There is a simple trend to be found below. The Division 2 benefits from higher CPU core counts until six cores, and twelve threads are utilised, after which performance remains the same. When using DirectX 11, The Division 2 is single-core limited, with all of our test configurations seeing limited minimum framerate scaling at higher CPU core counts. 

When using an RTX 2080 Ti at this resolution, it is clear that The Division 2 is CPU bound, never reaching 100% GPU utilisation under DirectX 11. However, we do see some strange results for core/thread counts of four or below. We will detail this oddity further when discussing our DirectX 12 results. 
  

  

DirectX 12

Under DirectX 12, we see a performance boost over DirectX 11 in most cases, seeing positive CPU scaling up to our maximum core/thread count of 8/16 on the Ryzen 7 1700X. 

It is clear from our testing below that The Division 2 prefers our Broadwell-E i7-6850K, but that doesn’t mean that Ryzen is no slouch here. Performance would likely be better on one of AMD’s newer Ryzen 2nd Generation processors, which benefit from reduced memory latencies, which often increase game performance in CPU limited scenarios.  

When we move down to our quad-core benchmarks, we see a strange result, with DirectX 11 offering more performance than DirectX 12, likely due to a lack of multi-threading benefits from such a low core count. On Radeon hardware, CPU performance appears to be more limited under DirectX 11, which is something that we will see later in our other DirectX 11/DirectX 12 tests.