Trying to work out if this is a problem with the game in general that needs patching, or something up with my PC.

So I dropped the settings from Ultra to the High preset as I wasn't happy with the framerate at the start. After that I get mostly solid 60fps. However, the game will go through moments where it's running like this:

Also, 100% of the time I try to revive someone the game completely freezes. Like I have to release the revive button before the frames start rendering again.

It's weird cause my CPU and GPU are at about 80% load, and when the stutters hit they both drop to 10% as if they are idling. Disk usage is minimal too, and using about 10GB of my 16GB of RAM. For what it's worth I'm running on an i5 4690k @ 4.4GHz and a GTX 980 (I didn't update to the latest drivers because of the issues people were reporting.)

Anyone else having similar issues, and do I just need to wait for a patch? Or is it a system issue my end?

The video had a few comments of people with the same issues, but no fix. I managed to play for 4 hours yesterday at solid 60 (ish) with no stutters, until they suddenly kicked in. Only fix I found so far is to close the game and restart my PC. Not ideal, but at least it buys me a few more hours of playtime.

The opening gameplay scene treated me with a wonderful 10 FPS for no apparent reason. Alt+Tabbing fixed it for some reason though. Hopefully they'll iron out these sorts of issues soon.

Out of curiosity, what card and driver are you using to play this?

On a 980 with the 361.91 version driver. Avoided 362.00 because of all the issues people were having.

Hmmmm weird. Wondering if there's a memory leak based on your description?

Thats weird, but it seems like something that will be fixed in future patches on their end.

I had a similar issue yesterday after about 4hrs of play the game just kind of crashes, after that when I try to reboot the game screen stays black but I can hear game audio. I full restart of uplay or PC seems to fix the issue.

@big_denim: I'm beginning to wonder the same thing!

I haven't encountered these issues, but I only played for an hour yesterday. I'll try to log some more time in tonight after work. I'll keep on eye on memory usage in the background and let you know if I find anything.

Disabling the Uplay overlay fixed all of the issues I had (black screen, framerate dips, being stuck in windowed). I never had stutter, but give it a shot.

Also try turning off any background recording stuff like Shadowplay or the win10 game dvr. Not that we should have to do that, but it might help. I can't even load into some other Ubi games with that stuff on.

Yeah I've had issues with the uplay overlay as well in the past not sure if that's the issue here. It acts like a memory leak but that has always caused my computer to bsod in the past. This just crashed the program and persists with no image until uplay is restarted. Atleast that's my issue.

i get odd slow downs time to time. like SUPER slow. seems random and mostly when i'm looking at my inventory or a store. But if someone is playing with me every hour or so they will hear "hrmm.. hey.. i think i'm crashing.. hrmm.. no.. ok. i'm back" :)

i'm running with 4 way SLI and a Gsync monitor. that mix causes problem time to time :)

Sorry if this is a big ol' necro.

I'm having the same issues shown in the video. My machine is certainly not a beast. i5 3470, GTX 960 4GB OC, 8GB RAM. Still after messing around with settings I get a comfortable 60-80 FPS.

But this freezing and stuttering is unreal. It happens out of the blue and there seems to be no rhyme or reason behind it. I hate to start pointing fingers without any evidence, but if I had to take a wild guess I'd say it has something to do with The Division's completely stupid lack of texture options, instead opting to stream in higher resolution textures until it thinks it has used enough of your VRAM.

Here's hoping someone finds a solution, or at the very least can confirm the cause. Because Google has just spat threads and pages like this one at me while looking for a fix.

@mr_e_skull: as someone with a GTX760 2GB* (and no random stall issues) - I'm incredibly happy with their decision to check how much VRAM I have and then just use it all. Get as much detailed textures as it can as quickly as it can as I'm going about my business in the world. None of this "I need to pick Medium because I've not got 3GB to spare but really that means 90% of the levels in this game will use less than 1.5GB of space because the resizing was all picked based on the worst case scenario and these normal maps are so blurry I might as well not even have lighting detail switched on" that some releases have been dealing with. Choosing lower detailed textures for performance issues used to make a lot more sense when GPUs had a lot more time spent doing memory reads for texture data but with so much shader compute being the limiting factor with current engines, I'd be surprised if more games don't move to managing their own memory (Hell, DX12 or Vulkan means you've got to be very explicit about memory management on the card so why not write that system to be really smart and stream in as much detailed work as you can fit into what you know is the total VRAM pool you've got to work with).

Like best of luck with getting a fix for this but please don't assume that one of the really smart decisions they made to keep this game generally ticking along really well (even with my old and wheezing card when attempting to do 1080p and hit 60fps with a game that looks this good) is the cause of this issue. We've seen a lot of games recently have stutter issues that randomly emerged (although not quite as badly as this) with things like Just Cause 3.

* Yes, I do need a new GPU for performance and lack of VRAM. Pascal and Polaris are coming up soon and will hopefully be worth the wait. But I've really enjoyed how the Division actually handles that stuff. If the texture load has been really heavy then you can see it scaling back and walking into a new area sometimes forces in a late load but everything seems incredibly smooth and playable. It also helps that the load (mainly in fast travel) times are far shorter on PC (at least running from SSD) than console.

@shivoa: I was thinking more along the lines of the constant streaming of textures possibly being the issue. It's unlikely since general consensus on this issue seems to be a memory leak. On the other hand I've not had this amount of freezing on any other game lately.

EDIT: In fact I can't recall this happening in the open beta test either. But it probably did.

The main issue I get is when I go to check out my new clothing options or something the graphics just go to shit or vanish kind of. It's fine once I exit the menu, but it's a weird thing that happens sometimes when I open the menu.

@kishinfoulux: Oh yes, that's definitely something that I think most people experience and was bugged in the betas too. When it's not bugged then it's quite nice with that soft blur (shot taken just as the text was jittering with that effect they use, hence it looking a bit weird)

Has anybody else had this happen? I re-spawned at a safe house then fast travelled back to the mission but fell through the world again. Did the same thing re-spawned, fast travelled then just gave that area a wide berth and managed to stay on the ground.

I think i saw austin post this same thing happening at some point, it happened multiple times as well.

I don't know how relevant this thread is anymore but I have finally found a FINAL FIX for myself and I hope it can prove helpful to someone else. My specs are AMD 8350 (OC to 4.5GHZ), NVIDIA GTX 980 in SLI with Surround enabled (5760x1080 resolution), 16GB of Kingston RAM, On board Realtek HD Audio with 5.1 Surround, Asus Crosshair V Formula MB and Win 10 x64.

I would like to now illuminate what I did so you know I exhausted every other possibility with no resolution until I got to this point. These aren't really in order but it is comprehensive.

*Verified Integrity a few times
*Moved the game to two separate SSD's from a 7200RPM HDD
*Disabled SLI in the game
*Reduced graphics to LOW and went to 1080P
*Disabled one to two cores in task manager
*Changed resolution in the game to refresh the settings
*Enabled Compatibility Mode for Win 7 & 8
*Changed to Windowed and Full screen Windowed from Full screen
*Enabled HPC (high performance compatibility) mode on my CPU (prevents the CPU from down clocking while under a load)
*Disabled Cool'n'Quite
*Changed priority to Low & High in Task Manager
*Ran Malware Bytes and CCleaner
*Disabled FPS & Game Overlay in Uplay
*Downgraded my video drivers to 361.91

One of these changes would give me ok performance until someone joined my group or I would be playing for more than 2hours and the the stuttering would come back. There was something most people do no note however, the RAM usage. I was using 12GB to 14GB of 16GB while in game, along with all the other issues 100% CPU usage, GPU usage was around 90% and stuttering to 10 to 20 FPS with the game becoming unplayable after a few hours. A full reboot did bring it back to a playable state but it wouldn't remain that way for very long.

Last night when I felt I had exhausted every option, I than went back over everything I read here and on other forums. There was a nagging issue of audio that never truly got resolved with the stuttering so I decided to install my Sound Blaster Z (I removed it cause drivers were crap in Win 7 and just never put it back in) and after doing that, I realized for a 100% fact it was fixed. This was backed up with 4 hours of me playing with no stuttering and the RAM usage only peaked to 7GB. That is a significant reduction of RAM usage and therefore I can only conclude that there is a memory leak when using a Realtek onboard audio R2.79 driver set.

I hope that downgrading the audio drivers can resolve this issue for anyone else suffering from this because I know this a little extreme for a fix. The results however cannot be denied on my end. I am now running NVIDIA's latest driver (364.51) with SLI enabled, 5760x1080 resolution with high/ultra settings and I'm getting no stuttering what so ever.

Hopefully this helps and can benefit others, cheers!

TL;DR: After I installed a 3rd party sound card the stuttering and extreme RAM usage when playing went away.

@kayden: What an odd fix. Thanks for the feedback, it definitely seems like a memory leak issue. It's been a lot better since launch but I'm also not playing for 4 hour sessions much anymore. If I do go for that long I just reboot the game at this point and it's usually acceptable performance wise.

I was having some odd issues w/ The Division including a massive decrease in FPS after playing for more than ten minutes or so, as well as some bad stuttering. After trying a whole lot of stuff, it turns out the issue was mostly related to my overclock settings. After changing my OC to emphasize BCLK a little more and the multiplier a little less (which also gave my RAM a small speed boost) the issue was almost completely resolved. I say "almost completely" because, in certain areas, I still get a little stuttering no matter what settings I'm using, but I suspect continuing to tweak my OC will smooth that out too.

I don't know if it'll help with your issue, but it might be worth a shot.