Deus Ex: Mankind Divided DirectX 12 Performance Review

Conclusion

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’s DirectX 12 update is currently in beta and it shows, with the new API offering small performance gains when compared to other DirectX 12 titles and lacking a lot of promised features like DirectX 12 multi-GPU support.   

At this time we can only recommend that players use DirectX 12 if they are using AMD GPUs, as this is the only scenario that achieves noticeable performance gains in all test cases.   

Eidos Montreal promised that DirectX 12 support would come to Deus Ex on the week of September 5th, and while DirectX 12 support has come it is by no means ready for the wider PC gaming world. There will be future updates to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided that will deliver DirectX 12 optimisations and eventually DirectX 12 multi-GPU support, but for now the game DirectX 12 support is frankly 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. 

During testing, we found that Nvidia’s Pascal Architecture was much more capable in DirectX 12 than their older Maxwell architecture, with the GTX 980Ti losing performance at all resolutions while Nvidia’s Pascal GPUs offered similar performance on both graphical APIs. 

Just like in our day-1 DirectX 11 testing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided performed best on AMD GPUs in DirectX 12, which is unsurprising as the game is an AMD sponsored “Gaming Evolved title”. Right now Nvidia still rules the roost with their high-end GTX 1080 and Pascal Titan X GPUs, which have no AMD made competitors, though AMD does offer the best performance when comparing similarly priced GPUs like the RX 480 and the GTX 1060. 

All-in-all Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’s DirectX 12 version is 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 do not offer any noteworthy performance gains, with Maxwell powered GPU losing performance in all cases. 

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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