If you’re playing The Division on PC, there are a few tweaks you can make to get the game running more smoothly. Or, if you’re getting a black screen at startup, to get the game running at all.
First of all, that black startup screen: If that’s happening to you, you should be able to easily get around it by hitting Alt+Enter. That will bump the game into windowed mode, which should allow it to load. It’s not quite hitting caps lock to load your base in XCOM 2, but as immediate fixes to seemingly catastrophic problems go, it’s still a good one.
I’m using an Nvidia graphics card and was initially having some trouble getting the game to go back into proper fullscreen mode after using the Alt+Enter trick. The solution I’ve found has been to disable the Uplay in-game overlay, which you can do in the Uplay settings menu. After doing that, the game would go back to true fullscreen, no problem. I’ve seen people in various forums saying that turning off the Uplay overlay also helped them resolve some stuttering and mouse input issues.
(It seems as though Nvidia’s latest drivers are having some issues in general, so hopefully they will release an updated driver soon.)
The Division has an impressive number of PC graphics options — there are expected settings like Antialiasing and Depth of Field, but also some more granular stuff like two separate settings for reflections and a whopping five for shadow quality. Nvidia has posted their usual big breakdown of all of the different settings, with helpful graphs that indicate which ones you can lower to get the biggest performance gains.
I’m running the game at 1440p resolution with an Intel i7 and an overclocked GTX 980Ti, and have been getting things running comfortably north of 60fps with a few notable tweaks: My shadow settings are mostly on medium, AA is turned off, I’ve left HBAO+ turned off and have turned Depth of Field down to “medium”. So far the game runs well enough and looks sharp enough to almost make up for the fact that most of the people I know are playing on PS4. (Almost.)
If you’ve got any other tips for how to get the most out of the PC version, I hope you’ll share them below.
Comments
15 responses to “A Few Helpful Tweaks For The Division On PC”
Anyone understand how the dual display option works?
I think it’s actually for when you’re running the game stretched across two screens, though I don’t even know how you would do that, or why.
It seems to shift all cut scenes and some menu items to the middle of two screens.
I only noticed it when I was getting a massive black border on the left of my single screen.
Tips?
Set everything to low, restrict frames to 30 fps, set screen res to 1600×900 and play the game on your potato.
http://imgur.com/a/wEF3C
I know those feels, I’m attempting to play on 1440p with a GTX670…
I’m playing on a HD 5850!
I was using a 6950, but the 1GB of VRAM was letting me down horrendously.
I’m running a HD7970 and I’m really surprised how awesome it’s running.
Everything on High, getting a constant 50FPS.
Biggest let down so far has been shitty internet causing lag issues.
Kirk, through my experience, AA has zero performance effect on GTX 500+ series cards. SMAA/TXAA do but not normal AA. should be able to max that with 0 FPS drop. i actually find TXAA to have almost no performance drop… SMAA however…
Can confirm alt+enter fixes the black screen.
Playing it on my new PC with everything maxed out, solid 60fps. Feels good man.
what’s in the new PC?
A big fat 980ti
That’s what I would go for if I was buying now, but I’m heading overseas soon, so all the savings are being directed there, plus Nvidia and AMD are both releasing new architectures quite soon, so I’m going to wait for a 1080 Ti or 490X or whatever they end up calling the new cards.
Any kind of overlay seems to cause the black screen on startup. Disable the ubi overlay, but also uninstalling things like Overwolf (the Teamspeak overlay) seems to help, regardless of if it is running at the time or not.
Hitting escape a bunch of times got me past the black screen
I booted up the game.. it ran well.. it looked good.. I didn’t bother to change anything. *shrugs*.