The Division’s beta favours AMD: the R9 390 heavily outperforms the GTX 970

The Division’s beta is far from perfect, but that’s kind of the point of a beta – to stress test the game, find its kinks and assist Ubisoft in sussing out and generally diagnosing any potential problems.

Granted, the exploitable netcode is really rather concerning, but Ubisoft would be daft to fix that before release.

Nevertheless, many use a game’s beta as a prediction of the game to come, which in The Division’s case is both good and bad. And in terms of performance, it’s just a wee bit concerning.

One of the things many were concerned with prior to the release of the beta was how it would perform.

Ubisoft’s track record with recent PC ports hasn’t exactly been stellar. So, we were happy to hear Ubisoft Massive, developers of The Division, had promised that the PC version of the game was a fully-fledged, well optimised game.

For the most part, that largely seems to be the case, but NVIDIA’s cards do seem to be struggling a tad.

In a recent analysis of the beta, Digital Foundry demonstrated that both the R9 390 and GTX 970 struggled to manage 60 fps at Ultra settings on 1080p, which isn’t that great to be honest.

Moreover, the R9 390 performs noticeably better than the GTX 970, sometimes staying as many as 15 frames-per-second ahead of the competition – even after NVIDIA released drivers targeting The Division.

This doesn’t prevent either from dipping into the low 40s fairly frequently, and in some cases as low as 35. This is a beta, however, so there’s hope for improvements via game and driver optimisations.

One thing to note, as demonstrated by Digital Foundry, is that overclocking your GTX 970 grants a significant performance improvement.

It’s not great news for anyone with something like a GTX 950; they’re definitely going to struggle.

Ramping up the game to ultra settings, and moving on to an i7 4790K paired with GTX 970 and R9 390, two observations are clear: firstly, we’re looking at minimum frame-rates on both cards in 35fps territory, but the AMD hardware shows a clear advantage over Nvidia in engine-driven cut-scenes and lower detail locations. This can rise to anything up to 15-20fps. It’s a remarkable advantage, and one that is sustained for much of the run of play in the beta, since most of the action occurs indoors. The advantage is even more noteworthy in that Nvidia released a game-ready driver for the beta, whereas AMD didn’t – we used the most recent 16.1 Radeon Crimson hotfix driver for our testing.” – Digital Foundry

What we are concerned about is how the PS4 looks to have many graphical effects that equate to the PC version’s Ultra setting, and yet cards like the GTX 970 and R9 390, which are far superior performance wise, can’t manage 60 fps.

At the very least, they’re capable of quite a bit more than 30 fps, which we’re fans of.