The Division 2 PC Performance Review

Graphics Performance – DirectX 11 VS DirectX 12

In this section, we will discuss how both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards perform under DirectX 11 and DirectX 12, noting how each GPU vendor responds to each graphical API when used with our 4GHz i9-6850K. Move to page 9, 10 and 11 for proper performance comparisons. 

On this page, we will look at 1080p and 4K performance to judge both the CPU-related and GPU-related performance benefits. 

On the AMD side, with the Radeon VII, Radeon RX Vega 64, Radeon RX Vega 54 and Radeon RX 580, we can see that framerates fall through the floor when using DirectX 11, implying that the game becomes CPU limited. If you move back to page 6, you will see that the game’s minimum framerates appear to be primarily single-thread limited under DirectX 11. This issue reemerges with Radeon graphics cards, but to a greater extent.  

On Radeon graphics cards, we would advise that all PC gamers use DirectX 12 when playing The Division 2, though on page 12 we will note one exception. 

Moving over to team Geforce, we see a similar trend as Radeon, with all high-end Geforce graphics cards seeing considerable boosts in minimum framerate and average framerates at 4K. Even on lower-end Nvidia graphics cards like our ASUS ROG Strix 1060, we can see that the GPU performs best under DirectX 12, even while the GPU isn’t CPU limited. 
 

  

4K

When cranking The Division 2 up to 4K, we can see that Nvidia’s graphics cards see reduced benefits from DirectX 12, either offering marginally less performance or marginally more performance. In short, the API makes no difference in most cases. 

On team Radeon, Massive Entertainment’s use of Asynchronous Compute sees AMD’s graphics cards offer a significant performance boost under DirectX 12, allowing graphics cards like the RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 to offer compelling performance levels.  

With these results in mind, we will continue to recommend DirectX 12 for 4K resolutions, as the CPU benefits we found at 1080p are still there; albeit masked by the GPU demands of 4K and all Radeon graphics cards benefit from the API change. On the Nvidia side, there is no compelling reason to shift to DirectX 11, as the performance difference is marginal.