The Division Beta: GTX 970 vs R9 390 Gameplay Performance

Digital Foundry:
The beta may be drawing to a close but here's a look at how the GTX 970 and R9 390 hold up running the game. There's a substantial AMD advantage here during internal areas and cut-scenes, with performance levelling out between the two in detail rich areas. But can we run it at 1080p60? Well, it takes settings tweaks and overclocking.

[Neonridr]

glad to see on the High settings the GTX 970 OC (which mine is) seems to maintain the 60fps minimum.

[curtis92]

Yeah same. high settings is where it's at with the 970

[DontGetMadItsAGame]

agreed same here love that card.

[awi5951]

This game needs some optimization those cards should have no problem running this game. The developers didnt optimize at all or a huge driver update is needed this is no crysis 3. I know we hope for updates but sometime they just throw it out the door and then we are stuck downloading a 2gb patch looking at you EA.

[BiggCMan]

It's true it doesn't look as good as something like Crysis 3. But take into consideration how massive this game is. This is a full scale, 1 to 1 replica of Manhattan, or at least midtown Manhattan. It's not a video game sized one like GTA 4, this is truly a full scale version of part of the burrow. And it's all loaded at once which is remarkable. It's all seamless, the dark zone is loaded as well. It's a lot to process, even if the graphics are not the best in the world. I think that is why it is so demanding.

[OoglyBoogly]

You have to realize too that the entire map and all the entities in it aren't all loaded at once. So while it's true that the buildings in the distance are rendered they're also basic geometry with lower resolution textures, shadows, etc. So the size of the city and it being open world doesn't really matter. Spiderman 2 on the PS2 was a big open world city yet it still looked and ran great.

Point being that the game/drivers need some optimization and it should be running a lot better. Really doesn't have anything to do with the size of the world (hell I remember turning around in the game and watching stuff like foliage and shadows render as I'm just watching it happen).

[Vegamyster]

Lowering the settings a bit doesn't impact the visuals too much but the performance gains are fairly large.

[Lamboomington]

'The devs didn't optimized'

You don't know that. It could just be the fact that on high and ultra settings, they've got a lot of advanced graphical features that most games don't have (all at a time) in an open world game.

More often than not, we need to turn down settings, it's that simple. We can't expect that when we turn on lots of high resolution shadows, volumetrics, object detail, high draw distance, high quality reflections everywhere, it's going to need a lot of processing power

This game is one of the best looking games of it's kind, you can expect it to be demanding.

'These cards shouldn't have problem running the game on high or ultra'
IMO that kind of statement is kind of arbitrary and meaningless though. The devs could downgrade it more to satisfy that, but we don't want that, ofcourse. We should judge based on how good it looks compared to other similar games, not based on 'high settings' or 'ultra settings'

[awi5951]

Or its just a lazy port from console.

[sarlucic]

The game is very pretty, it has an incredible amount of dynamic props and what not lying around the map, the lightning effects and especially weather effects with snow that melts in fire and snowstorms and what not is amazing to look at.

You can always optimize more, but the fact that I can play this with high settings on a gtx 680 soc means that they have optimized it very well.

[Voids]

When is DirectX 12 coming out to Windows 10?

[Anomander]

It's already available. One current game that is using it Ashes of the Singularity. It also has a DX12 benchmark you can use to benchmark your PC.

[DontGetMadItsAGame]

Windows 10 is the devil dont do it.

[kbozz71]

lolz

[Vhampir]

It's been out since Windows 10 launched. A few select developers had access a few months before launch. Unreal Engine 4 has full DX12 support as well.

A few games, ESO and Just Cause 3, will be patched for it. I think Hitman and FarCry Primal will be the first big games that use it at launch.

[Anomander]

Hmmm it would be interesting to see if they allow the option to run Just Cause 3 in either DX11 mode or DX12 mode. Even better include a benchmark program so we can see what differences we are getting by running which version of DX.

[Voids]

>Notices 970 performance vs R9
>Gets Sad
>Keeps watching video when screen splits to 3 columns
>Notices 970 OC performance killing it
>Looks at personal gaming computer with 970 OC inside
feelsgood.jpg