Tom Clancy's The Division DirectX 12 Performance Review

Conclusion

| Source: Ubisoft Price: Author: Mark Campbell

Conclusion

DirectX 12 and other graphical APIs represent the future of PC gaming, allowing developers to deliver additional gaming performance with fewer system resources if games are developed with them in mind.

Today DirectX 12 is still in its infancy, with developers inexperienced with the new API, often porting a DirectX 11 title over to the new API rather than developing a game for these new APIs from the start. It will take a few years to developers to learn and share their knowledge and for engine makers to fully implement all of DirectX 12's features, which means that right now games that support DirectX 12 often offer minimal and often negative performance impacts.

In Tom Clancy's The Division DirectX 12 support only offers increased performance in select circumstances, only being suited to those with AMD Radeon GPUs or those who have their game performance limited by their CPUs.

Users of AMD GPUs will see a decent boost in performance when running the game with DirectX 12, both when it comes to minimum framerates and average framerates. DirectX 12 will give players of The Division much smoother framerates, making the new API a must for Radeon users.

On the Nvidia side, we see that performance decreases in almost all of our test cases, with the most significant performance decreases being seen when using Nvidia's older Maxwell-based GPUs. While Nvidia's new Pascal-based GPUs also see performance decreases, these decreases are much smaller than what we see on Nvidia's older hardware. Right now we cannot recommend that Nvidia users run The Division using DirectX 12, though it may be beneficial in Multi-GPU systems when DX12 Multi-GPU support is added.

It is great to see Ubisoft and Massive continuing to update The Division, delivering DirectX 12 support well after the release of the title. Hopefully, in time the game can gain more performance from this new API and Ubisoft's developers can learn a lot from the experience, allowing them to deliver better implementations of DirectX 12 in their future games.

In The Division DirectX 12 provides very similar performance benefits to what we have seen in other games like Hitman 2016 and Battlefield 1. When using DirectX 12 AMD's GCN and Polaris Architecture are able to see some significant performance benefits, giving them the advantage moving forward as these new APIs become more commonly used.

When using DirectX 12 AMD's GCN and Polaris Architecture are able to see some significant performance benefits, giving them the advantage moving forward as these new APIs become more commonly used. AMD will need to create some more powerful GPU hardware to take advantage of their advanced DirectX 12 support, as right now Nvidia's GTX 1080 easily outperforms everything AMD has to offer regardless of what API is used.

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