The Division (release) - i5 4690K & GTX 770 - FPS test and settings (w/ benchmark)

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• published: 08 Mar 2016
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Greetings, everyone. Today we’re back with The Division, after a long wait and two amazing betas the game has been released today, at last. Back in the closed beta, I checked how the game ran and what settings I considered best for my current system specs; now with the official release build and with the day one patch, plus a new set of Nvidia game ready drivers, I decided to revisit my old settings and see if anything’s changed. As usual, my current PC specs are the following: -CPU: i5 4690K@4.4 GHz (Turbo) with Coolermaster Hyper 212 EVO. -Mobo: Asus Maximus VII Ranger. -GPU: Asus GTX 770 DirectCU II OC 2 GB with no extra OC and latest Game Ready driver. -RAM: 16 GB DDR3@1866, 9-10-9-28. -Storage: Kingston SSDNow 300, 240 GB where both game and O.S. are installed. -O.S: Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64bit with latest updates. -Game running at 1080p/144 Hz. Firstly, I want to say that having read the notes for the day one patch, I was expecting some performance hit because the developers seem to have enabled / improved some global illumination settings at some places that were either missing or just not being properly done in the betas. To my surprise, though, this was not the case and the game runs pretty much almost like it did for me in the betas, which is a good thing. For starters, something that I find odd, is that the recommended Geforce Experience settings are way too low, with lots of things disabled…alright anyway, I tried those settings just to see the level of performance Nvidia thinks they can produce on my system. The results are that I can play at 60+ FPS at all times with those very low settings, but honestly I know my system can handle a bit more, so I also offer my own custom settings which, as usual, offer a balance between quality and performance, trying to aim for 50 FPS most of the time, which in my opinion is a good number for this type of game and my current GPU, running at 1080p of course, as always. I also noticed that Nvidia added yet another new shadow technique, besides PCSS+, called HFTS, which seems to eat as much performance as PCSS+ anyway, and I don’t really recommend any of these two settings for a GTX 770….it’s just too much to handle. As with the previous betas, the most demanding settings are still those related to shadows, ambient occlusion (which I recommend setting to low or medium, if you want to squeeze some extra FPS) and volumetric fog, which I like to run on medium, since at higher levels it can get quite demanding on certain weather conditions and fights. I have to say, though, that the game still looks amazing at ultra settings, and even the ultra preset is not really everything at max, we can still up the AO a lot, up to HBAO+ levels, and the shadows, with the two special techniques implemented by Nvidia. HBAO+ in particular really shines in this game, but it’s too bad the performance hit on my 770 is too great, I can still sustain 40+ FPS with HBAO+ and some tweaked settings but for intense combat situations and Dark Zone stuff I’d rather have the extra FPS. Overall, compared to the betas, the game seems to run even better than ever, with a more consistent CPU usage which in the betas tended to be a bit unstable and more than often went to 100% on some cores; none of that I’ve seen so far in this release build of the game, and I’m quite happy about it. I’m really looking forward to getting a next generation GPU when they eventually arrive later this year so I can crank this game up to the maximum possible levels because it really is a beautiful looking game and the developers have managed to keep a good amount of visual fidelity even when running low settings, which is amazing. That’s all for now, I hope you guys found this video update about the game interesting, and I’ll see you around : )