Graphical settings for a console game isn’t a new idea, Project CARS allowed console users to sacrifice frames for prettier visuals last year, but it’s certainly rare – making Tom Clancy’s The Division a rare breed indeed.
As you know, The Division’s beta revealed a few toggleable graphical settings for the console versions: namely, sharpening and chromatic aberration, among a few others.
These can turned on or off, affecting the overall aesthetic of the game but aren’t true graphical settings as they shouldn’t have any bearing on the game’s performance.
In a recent interview with Team Epiphany, The Division’s developers mentioned being able to tweak, as-yet-unnamed, lighting effects in order to improve performance.
“It’s actually great that we’re given the option you can actually disable certain lighting aspects to improve frame rates in the console versions. I don’t know another game that does that. So if you want to choose frame-rate over visuals, you can if you want.”
The idea is to let players balance performance and visuals, but there was no mention of how far users can fall on one side or the other.
Also, the console versions are meant to be capped at 30 fps, so how will affecting performance make that much of a difference? It may have something to do with reducing performance spikes.
We can see it making a difference for the Xbox One version. Allowing players to lower the quality of lighting a tad in return for less of an impact from dynamic resolution scaling.
Until the game releases, we can’t be sure these settings will ultimately be included.
It’s an interesting approach to console game development – stemming from Ubisoft Massive’s development of a dedicated PC version and building support for graphical variability into the Snowdrop Engine as a result.
Should it prove worthwhile, Ubisoft may iterate on this particular feature in future Snowdrop-powered games.
More from The Division
The Division’s beta favours AMD: the R9 390 heavily outperforms the GTX 970
The Division’s netcode is exploited: hackers everywhere
Of course, The Division is the best experience on PC
