The Division’s Options Menu Looks Very Promising

Ubisoft has a pretty abysmal reputation when it comes to creating optimized PC versions which scale properly across a wide range of hardware. This is exemplified by Assassin’s Creed Unity and other difficult to run titles like Watch Dogs. As always, we live in hope that the studio is taking PC gaming more seriously and investing resources into making competent PC editions. One of Ubisoft’s most anticipated releases is The Division, a third person MMO set in New York. According to images captured by Gearnuke from the PC beta, it seems the options menu will contain a huge array of tweaks to help find a balance between visual quality and system performance

The graphical settings includes supersampling, reflection quality, x16 anisotropic filtering, ambient occlusion, depth of field, chromatic aberration, a frame-rate limit, shadow resolution and more! This is very promising and could indicate that the PC version has been given some attention.

On the other hand, this is taken from the beta and might not reflect the final version. Also, just because there’s a huge array of options doesn’t mean the game is going to run very well. The video in question provides a poor representation of the game’s optimization as footage was recorded on low settings, at 1280×720. Additionally, the end-user has a fairly modest setup with a GTX 650 Ti 1GB, 8GB RAM, and Intel i5 processor. At these particular settings, the game runs between 55-65 during city sections which is fairly impressive given the low specification and 1GB video memory limit.

The Division is scheduled to officially launch on March 8th, 2016 for the PC, PS4 and Xbox One. There are two ways to access the beta, either pre-order the game (I don’t recommend this) or sign up to a waiting list. In all honesty, I doubt PC players are going to struggle to access the game, and even if you do, information regarding performance should be revealed very soon.