Gadgetory

welcome back to hadron box today we're back with a game optimization video for Ubisoft's latest release Tom Clancy's the division to the last optimization guide we did was for Metro Exodus we know there's been a few other tires released between then and now such as fire crane new dawn and firm and Devil May Cry but been a bit busy around here so this is unfortunately the the next tile that we've been able to get to and boy is this a prime candidate for an optimization video that's not because the division 2 runs poorly or seems uh knock demised in fact Ubisoft snowdrop engine seems to run really well on PC the game has fantastic graphics and loads of excellent PC specific features including full HDR support and even niche stuff like eye tracking instead it's the absolute multitude of graphics options you get in this game though it seems to go on forever and seems quite daunting at first glance lucky there are basic presets here but still nothing is hidden away from view in this game like was the case with Metro so as usual the goal this video is to explore nearly every quality setting in the game to show you guys both a visual quality comparison between the different options as well as the performance impact as we'll go be giving some recommendations on what I think delivers the best balance between visuals and performance which we then summarized into our own custom preset that I'll go through at the end the hope is to give you guys more performance without sacrificing too much from graphics quality our usual notes for these videos apply here as well I'm using micro 990 900k test rig overclocked to 5 gigahertz with 16 gigabytes of ddr4 memory we used this system to remove old CPU bottlenecks during testing this is a GPU heavy game for most people so it shouldn't end up being CPU limited we've tested a range of GPUs for the performance numbers from both brands and in multiple performance categories averaging out the results give you a decent idea of how each setting scales a performance data comes from the games benchmark tool which runs over 90 seconds and I found to be pretty representative of in-game performance some benchmark tools can be a bit weird but at least from what I've played of the game this one is pretty good we use a single benchmark run forever setting to give you a more general performance overview rather than simple framerate spot checks that can over exaggerate the differences or show just worst-case performance this also means the performance data is not taken from the scene we use as an example to show the visual differences the game captures you see throughout the video taking using an NVIDIA GeForce r-tx 2080 and 4k we recommend playing back this video at 4k because it can be a bit hard to spot the differences at YouTube's lower 1080p resolution and bitrate sometimes YouTube doesn't process these videos to 4k very quickly so we're also going to provide a source quality video for our patrons we can just download it right now in 4k the first thing I want to discuss is DirectX 11 vs. DirectX 12 you can play the division 2 in either mode and I found DirectX 12 to be slightly better overall average frame rates were marginally ahead with DirectX 11 with the latest drivers but it's the large jump in 1% low performance that gives the nod to DX 12 as it leads to a smoother more stable experience the other key option is the reduced input latency mode which is enabled by default Ubisoft says that turning this option off can lead to increased frame rates but I didn't find that to be the case with the cheapest I've tested so I suggest leaving this mode enabled will kick things off here with the presets there are four options ultra high medium and low which keeps things pretty simple most of the individual quality settings also have four modes so as you step down each preset the settings get a corresponding step down however even when using the ultra mode some settings are not at their highest mention why that might be the case a bit later like the presets in a lot of games there's not a huge difference between ultra and high Ultra gives you slightly better draw distance for objects and textures and slightly higher shadow and reflection resolutions it's the increased draw distance that I noticed the most and then moving from high down to medium again each of these areas drops off a bit further especially draw a distance while also introducing noticeable reductions in shadowing and ambient occlusion with that said overall the difference between ultra and medium is quite respectable it's not a huge downgrade by any means where it really falls away is with a low which has noticeably worse reflection and shadow quality much lower drawer distances for all elements lower lighting quality lower ambient occlusion and also a lower render resolution low is the only preset that sets the render scale below a hundred in this case using a level of 75 so we're also seeing upscaling at this preset I wouldn't recommend it unless you have an entry-level rig in terms of performance we're seeing good scaling here there is nearly a 3x difference in framerate between the ultra and low presets which suggests that those with entry-level systems will be able to achieve good performance here that said a lot of this performance comes from the resolution scale moving from ultra down to high season near 30 percent performance improvement and I suspect that will be worth it for many gamers struggling to hit that 60 to 80 FPS range for example my r-tx 2080 at 4k high delivered a 60 FPS experience but Ultra did not and with the visual changes their high is definitely the way to go moving down to medium gives me a 60% improvement over Ultra and again it's worth considering for reduced visual quality really all these presets are good depending on your hardware though I feel hi is perhaps the best bounce it's also worth mentioning that has a lot of settings here impact memory usage lowering the preset can give larger gains on more constrained cards on an Rx 574 gigabyte for example in 1080p shifting from Ultra to medium was an 80% increase rather than 60% on higher and GPUs shadow quality is a simple setting in the division to each increased overs higher resolution shadows with better draw distances by default the ultra preset uses high shadows bumping then up to very high does present a small increase to sharpness but it's when moving down to medium or low that things start to fall away especially resolution on the low mode here you will often see jagged shadow edges in terms of performance it's not hard to see why the developers have chosen high for the ultra preset a switch into very high causes a six percent loss to performance but only a minor visual improvement there's also no real difference between high and medium so my suggestion here is to use high with low and it's two percent improvement reserved for entry-level gamers the spot shadow setting refers to how many shadows are rendered from point lights in the game such as street lamps I can only spawn a significant difference between the medium and low modes with low removing a lot of shadows in night scenes considering both high and medium also to have a roughly the same performance this is a setting lightly on high the spot shadow resolution setting is much more noticeable which surprise surprise affects the sharpness of spot shadows Ultra is the clear best option here with each reduction in setting causing blurry at shadow edges even turn you down just from ultra high makes a pretty noticeable difference if you have the performance despair Ultra does to live a noticeably better shadows for around a 2 to 3 percent performance penalty if you're squeezing every last drop I think high is the way to go contact shadows is another form of shadowing that allows an object to shadow itself or other objects in close proximity as the setting requires a restart it was very difficult to get a good visual comparison between each mode however not to worry because it doesn't have a significant performance impact so I'd keep it on all high here sharpening is a cosmetic feature but I just wanted to verify this wasn't using some sort of anti aliasing the good news is it's not so you can change the setting and it will not impact performance as it's purely post-processed sharpening it does deliver a noticeable visual change though the zero mode is quite blurry while 10 is perhaps a bit too sharp with 7 being the default I think 7 or 8 gives the best balance of sharpness with Jaggi reduction particle detail again quite hard to get a comparison here due to the dynamic nature of particles however it seems the setting only affects weapons particles such as explosions rather than leaves and so on which seemed unaffected moving from ultra down to low as there's no significant performance difference between each mode I'm sticking with Ultra here Ubisoft does love to use volumetric fog in their games across their game engines it's been known to cause heavy performance hits in Assassin's Creed which uses the anvilnext engine and watchdogs to which uses disrupt it's the same story with the division 2 and its snowdrop engine here the visual differences between the four modes are there you get slightly denser and more realistic fog with the ultra and higher modes compared to a more modest implementation with medium and low but the performance hit is huge dropping from Ultra to hide delivers a 10% improvement and then Ultra to medium is more like 20% give medium-level fog still looks good and doesn't affect the atmosphere of the game too much and the performance difference between medium and low is quite small I don't from medium here to instantly gain 20% to your performance it's pretty crazy but this is the most intensive setting in the game reflection quality is split into two modes the standard mode named reflection quality delivered no performance improvement in my testing so high is best to use there it's with a local reflection quality that you'll start to see differences and performance gains as this setting dictates how well water and other surfaces reflect nearby objects every option aside from off here seems to use a modified version of screen space reflections that doesn't suffer from horrible artifacting when your character obscures reflections so it's a pretty good implementation here reflections still disappear when you shift around the camera when they shouldn't but yeah overall it's pretty impressive moving too often doesn't remove reflections entirely either it merely switches to using reflection maps which look decent but aren't very accurate that said I'm still pleased that even when you turn off screen space reflections you still are getting at least some form of this technique the difference between the four screen space modes is purely down to resolution overall the reflections are quite muted even on the very high mode but this becomes more apparent shifting to say medium or low given that moving from just very high down to high sees the 7% performance improvement for a small visual quality increase I feel that's a great choice to make you won't see as high gains shifting any lower until you switch this mode off entirely which is another big boost and still only recommend offers an option for mid-range or entry-level gamers though vegetation quality has three modes but it's only the low mode that I spotted a difference between medium or high the low mode seems to remove a number of vegetation shadows that are present at the higher modes but overall the density of vegetation isn't really changed across all of the modes given it only delivers a 1% performance improvement shifting from high to low I'd keep this on high and enjoy more depth to the vegetation subsurface scattering again I find it quite hard to spot the visual changes here outside of cutscenes you gain about 1% of performance if you switch it off but for me I'll just basically leave this one on an electronic filtering is the same affair in the division too as other games although bizarrely this is one of the few set that requires a restart to change not sure what the reasoning behind that is but 16x still it was the sharpest textures with the best drawer distances at strange angles but it's only when shifting down to 2 X or 1x that the reduction in quality becomes noticeable it's also where the performance impacts begin to kick in with 2x delivering a surprisingly high 5% performance advantage over 16x even on a high-end card given 2 X does blur textures a fair bit I'd stick to using 16x unless you're searching for a lot more performance parallax mapping is a simple setting that improves object depth as the game says without adding geometry it's a low-cost version of tessellation there seems to work well in this game providing a subtle improvement in good news for those after the best performance disabling it only delivers a 1% performance improvement so it's not worth disabling ambient occlusion is used pretty suddenly throughout the division too you won't see any enormous changes between the four modes and it's especially nice to see that even with a low mode ambient occlusion isn't removed entirely instead the main difference I spotted was a noticeably reduced ambient occlusion resolution with the medium and low modes whereas the high and very high modes were quite similar given high is a 2 percent improvement over very high it's a good change to make while medium is suitable for lower end gamers depth of field is similar in this game to many others and doesn't see a performance impact in general gameplay it's a similar cosmetic setting to the vignette mode chromatic aberration mode and lens flare in that there is no performance difference between on and off object detail is an interesting setting because it has granular control between 0 and 100 with 60 being the default for the ultra preset I didn't test every individual option there's a hundred of them so that would be pretty crazy but I did check out 160 30 and zero there isn't a significant difference between a hundred and 60 in most situations which explains again why ultra defaults to 60 when you start dipping below 50 objects are removed from scenes and it does increase pop in so at 30 or 0 for example moving around can see objects randomly appear on most cards with a decent level of VRAM jumping from 60 down to zero does deliver a 5 percent improvement to average frame rates and nearly 8 percent to 1 percent low so it is reasonably but I found the popin really annoying so my preference is to keep it on 60 with that said those with a four gigabyte card or lower might need to turn it down as you can see up to 20 percent gains on more constrained systems the Division two has another setting that is very useful for memory constraint Hardware called extra streaming distance this defaults to the maximum ten with the ultra preset and does improve popping as you move around although again it's very difficult to get a good comparison for this one lowering this to five delivers a three percent improvement on most cards with a decent level of VRAM though pop in increases so I wouldn't recommend it again users with four gigabyte or lower cards can see more than a 10 percent improvement in reducing the setting so it's worth experimenting with if you are on the lower end of the vram scale yep there are more things in this game luckily only a handful more water quality is reduced when saying the game to either the medium or low modes with a seeming reduction to the resolution of ripples and other interactions I'd keep this one on high giving you only get a three percent improvement dropping it down to low and low is a visual downgrade projected texture resolution is a setting I honestly couldn't figure out if it had any visual impact it also didn't seem to have a massive performance impact delivering 1% more performance going from 512 to 128 and that wasn't high with rear am constrained cards maybe this is for really entry-level gamers I kept it on 512 which is what the ultra mode uses by default next we get down to high resolution sky textures a very much difference in sky and cloud quality between the two modes with on looking slightly better as you might expect no performance difference between the modes with the card that had a decent amount of VRAM and there's only a small impact with a 4 gigabyte card terrain quality appears to mostly affect the quality of terrain textures so high has the best terrain textures with the other modes reducing the clarity of services though also seem to reduce geometry slightly in any case not a huge performance impact so high as the best mode to use as you can continue to enjoy nice and crisp terrain surfaces and that's all the individual quality settings in their division to cover there is great scope of optimization in this game for all PC gamers whether you have a high-end card or something more entry-level as number of settings really help out in travel cards in reducing VRAM usage I feel - custom presets of work and recommending a harbour quality option for those that want the best visual quality and have say six to eight gigabytes of vram or more and a high performance option for more entry-level cars with four gigabytes of vram or less Hubble quality is very similar to the Ultra preset with a few notable changes dropping volumetric fog to medium recovers a ton of performance as to switching local reflections to high I also recommend high ambient occlusion those are the three key settings to change and doing this delivers a 33 percent performance improvement over the Ultra preset for almost no visual downgrade this is a much better option than the high preset which turns down a lot of other settings that have no performance impact but reduce visuals so our custom hub quality preset ends up looking better and performing slightly better as well how performance adjust several other things most notably turning local reflections to off water quality to low and ambient occlusion to medium which recovers more performance again then several other settings help improve performance through reducing memory usage including reductions to object detail and streaming overall for a card like the RS 570 this leads to a 70% improvement over Ultra though visual quality is noticeably reduced so depending on how entry-level your card is you might want to turn some things back up while preserving the memory reducing settings there's really not a lot to complain about here though Ubisoft has put in a lot of work to deliver a game that both looks great on high-end hardware while also running nicely on less powerful systems even the intensive settings aren't particularly outrageous except for volumetric lighting which is easy to correct I think snowdrop is one of the better engines Ubisoft have right now and that is showing with the division - as well as being graphically impressive the game seems pretty decent so I'm looking forward to checking it out soon and playing it the whole way through to the end game thinking it might try it out solo but you never know I never played the first one as well so that might have been a bit of a mistake anyway that's it for this one hopefully this guide was useful because with so many graphic settings is taken a bit of time to put this one together consider subscribing for more graphics optimization videos although the next guide may be a few months away looking at the game release schedule so for us on patreon to get cool perks like access to our discord community and I'll catch you in the next one