Using a single GTX 980 Ti at 1080p with the high quality preset shows The Division to be a mostly GPU-bound game. I expect that the CPU will become more important in the Dark Zone with other players, but gathering accurate data here is nearly impossible. In any case the game certainly doesn’t look to be hard on the CPU as long as you have four threads to play with. Although the Core i3, Core i5 and all the AMD processors showed extremely high CPU utilization, often hovering around 100%, the performance didn’t appear to suffer when compared to processors that weren’t heavily utilized, such as the 4960X and 5960X for example.
Above we have more evidence that The Division isn’t a particularly demanding game on the CPU, as the Core i7-6700K provided much the same performance at 2.50GHz as it did at 4.50GHz with the GTX 980 Ti.
The FX-9590 also showed little decline in performance when reducing the operating frequency by as much as 44%, just a 13% drop in minimum frame rate was seen.
