On the face of it, The Division 2's upgrade for next generation consoles should be fairly simple to describe, with wholly predictable results. Similar to titles like God of War and Days Gone, the last-gen codebase is updated with the game aware it's running on new hardware, unlocking the frame-rate in the process. The end result should be a capped 30fps experience now running at 60 frames per second – or close to it – with little or nothing else changed in the process. That's effectively what you're getting on Xbox Series X, but something is definitely amiss with the PS5 build, which is missing important graphics effects – visual features that aren't just present on Xbox consoles, but on PS4 Pro too.
But still, the headline is that all versions now run at 60fps, lifting the 30fps cap from the last-gen experience. It feels vastly smoother of course, transformative for a third person shooter, and there are improvements to loading times too – plus improved texture filtering on Xbox Series consoles. In terms of resolutions, The Division 2 retains the game's impressive temporal reconstruction technique, meaning we had to jump through hoops somewhat to discern actual native pixel counts. Dynamic resolution is in play on all systems, meaning that the 60fps action is delivered with a 900p to 1080p resolution range on Xbox Series S, rising to a 1800p-2160p range on Series X. Meanwhile, PlayStation 5 operates with a much wider range – 1080p is seemingly the lowest recorded resolution, rising to a maximum of 1890p.
Graphics settings on the Xbox consoles look to be a close match to the last-gen Xbox One X, but the move to solid-state storage and improved CPUs boosts the efficiency of the background streaming systems, with texture and geometry pop-in minimised to a certain extent – good stuff! In effect, Xbox Series consoles essentially get the game-changing boost in frame-rate married with additional visual refinements, mostly delivered by the system level back-compat feature set and the raw horsepower of the new hardware.
