Deus Ex Mankind Divided DX 12 Performance Review

Conclusion

Deus Ex’s DirectX 12 update can sadly be called nothing short of a disappointment, with the new API delivering less performance on Nvidia GPUs and lower average framerates on AMD hardware. Yes, AMD’s minimum framerates do increase slightly, but these performance gains are often as little as one or two FPS, which is so low that they are almost meaningless.    

On Nvidia’s Pascal GPUs the performance decrease is minimal, often being only 1-2 FPS lower in DirectX 12 than it was in DirectX 11, but it is still a decrease, which leaves us recommending that all Nvidia users stick to DirectX 11 in this particular title. On Nvidia’s Maxwell GTX 980Ti we found huge decreases in GPU performance, which were as high as 15% in some cases, which means that users of older Nvidia hardware should definitely avoid using the DirectX 12 API in Deus EX Mankind Divided.    

Eidos Montreal had originally promised that DirectX 12 support would come to Deus Ex, but even now as it is officially added to the game the game it still feels like a beta option that could use some extra development time. There will be future updates to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided that will deliver extra DirectX 12 optimisations and eventually DirectX 12 multi-GPU support, but for now the game DirectX 12 support is disappointing. 

This mirrors the early DirectX 12 performance of Rise of the Tomb Raider, which did not offer any significant performance gains early on but over time became much more usable as the Crystal Dynamics continued to deliver more DirectX 12 oriented performance patches and fixes. 

All-in-all Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’s DirectX 12 version still feels incomplete and does not offer performance gains that are consistent with other DirectX 12 titles. Right now we would only recommend that AMD GPU users play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided in DirectX 12 as Nvidia hardware only offering lost performance. Even on AMD hardware the performance benefits that we see with minimum framerate are so small that they will be unnoticeable to most players, so even now DirectX 11 is still a great option for AMD users.  

Hopefully, Eidos Montreal will continue to update their DirectX 12 implementation moving forward, as we would certainly like to see this demanding new title get a little but easier to run on PC. 

 

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