Deus Ex: Human Revolution Performance Test

Nice testing Steven.
Happy to report I haven't even bothered to check my FPS in this game on my i7 2600K, 2 x 5850 system as it's running smooth as silk with everything maxed and using MLAA. Do you guys not have a 5850 available for benchmarking? Find it strange the old 460 GTX is included in the benchmark from Nvidia camp while the 5850 equivalent AMD card isn't. I guess the 5870 is fairly close in performance level so it's not a genuinely worrying omission.
 
I found this game not to be demanding at all. Pretty much any decent, and even somewhat decent card can handle it just fine. My friend has a laptop which he uses for homework, and has an Nvidia GT240M, and he has played this little gem without much of a problem. I assume any self respectable desktop can also handle this game.

For such a big, complex game, I found it to be quite stable too. And its great because it is accessible to almost any gamer. Also, great job on the review, really liked the little background of Adam on the graphs.
 
I am playing this game on my laptop (i5-450m, Radeon Mobility 5850) and the graphics / performance ratio is awesome ! I dont see how people could complain about the graphics
 
Very impressed with the performance and stability of this game. Obviously they released the final product (which is saying something these days...)
 
Arris said:
Nice testing Steven.
Happy to report I haven't even bothered to check my FPS in this game on my i7 2600K, 2 x 5850 system as it's running smooth as silk with everything maxed and using MLAA. Do you guys not have a 5850 available for benchmarking? Find it strange the old 460 GTX is included in the benchmark from Nvidia camp while the 5850 equivalent AMD card isn't. I guess the 5870 is fairly close in performance level so it's not a genuinely worrying omission.

Ouch. I'm running a GTX 460 1gb model OC to 900mhz combined with my i5 2500k at stock settings and I'm pulling framerates that are either equivalent or greater than my friend's 6870 with an i5. I don't think the 5870 is quite in the ballpark of the "old" 460.
 
LOL..."old" 460?? That card only came out in July of last year. Barely a year old.

Great review - very thorough. I especially loved your intro line: "...most of the games we have run performance tests on this year have been shameful console ports that would struggle to max out a tablet PC." That's a sad statement, but truer words have never been spoken.

I'm running the game maxed out at 1920x1200 with two 460's 1GB in SLI, 12GB RAM and an i7-960 and it's moving along without a hitch. I'm not sure what the graphics complaints are - the game looks great. From what I've experienced so far, it's all indoors stuff though. I think people are trying to compare it to games like Witcher 2 where there are a lot of outdoor scenes with a ton of fauna and that makes any game look "better." I personally have no complaints about the graphics...
 
I don't think the 5870 is quite in the ballpark of the "old" 460.

I'm a bit confused - based on this statement it sounds like you're saying you think the 460 is faster than the 5870. Am I misunderstanding you?
 
LNCPapa said:
I don't think the 5870 is quite in the ballpark of the "old" 460.

I'm a bit confused - based on this statement it sounds like you're saying the 460 is faster than the 5870. Am I misunderstanding you?

You're not, and he's completely wrong. The 5870 is at least 25% more powerful than the 460. I'd say closer to 30-35% even.
 
most of the games we have run performance tests on this year have been shameful console ports that would struggle to max out a tablet PC.
lol

raswan said:
LNCPapa said:
I don't think the 5870 is quite in the ballpark of the "old" 460.

I'm a bit confused - based on this statement it sounds like you're saying the 460 is faster than the 5870. Am I misunderstanding you?

You're not, and he's completely wrong. The 5870 is at least 25% more powerful than the 460. I'd say closer to 30-35% even.

I'm running a 25% OC on my GTX 460, that's on top of the factory overclock. 715/1430/1800 to 920/1840/1915. An OC'd 460 can easily beat a stock 5870. However, an OC'd 5870 is a different story. I'd also hazard a guess that most people here overclock so the performance they see in the benchmark isn't what they get themselves.
 
I was a little worried about how well my system would handle this game ( 8800GTX 1gig with a E8400 C2D CUP) but it runs very nicely. Right afterload scenes I sometimes get a bit of FPS lag for a few seconds but nothing terrible. I haven't had any issues during intense action scenes where you REALLY don't want any lag.

As far as the game goes I'm having fun with it. I like the exp system for the augmentations where it looks like theoretically I could get everything instead of having to pick one and locking yourself out of the other like the first on did.
 
I have 2 580's in SLI mode but in nvidia's control center when I enable the option to display the SLI bar while in Sli it doesnt appear in the game.

Am I missing something?

It appears even with 2 cards it only uses 1 card
 
Did you try running something like MSI Afterburner to see if each GPU is actually doing anything in game? I'd try that first to make sure it's not actually working.
 
Great review and invaluable! TS is my goto site for game performance reviews.

The game was fun, but nothing to write home about honestly. Please don't get your panties in a bunch if you disagree. The bottom line for me is that it was indeed fun... nothing less, nothing more.
 
Any chance of memory bandwidth benchmarks? I know it doesn't matter to some folks, but It'd be interesting to see if faster memory makes any difference in modern games.

Otherwise, good analysis and I particularly enjoy the wide variety of CPU's tested.
 
TorturedChaos said:
I was a little worried about how well my system would handle this game ( 8800GTX 1gig with a E8400 C2D CUP) but it runs very nicely. Right afterload scenes I sometimes get a bit of FPS lag for a few seconds but nothing terrible. I haven't had any issues during intense action scenes where you REALLY don't want any lag.

As far as the game goes I'm having fun with it. I like the exp system for the augmentations where it looks like theoretically I could get everything instead of having to pick one and locking yourself out of the other like the first on did.

Time for an upgrade I'm assuming.
 
Firstly thanks for all the positive feedback guys, we really appreciate it!

Arris said:
Nice testing Steven.
Happy to report I haven't even bothered to check my FPS in this game on my i7 2600K, 2 x 5850 system as it's running smooth as silk with everything maxed and using MLAA. Do you guys not have a 5850 available for benchmarking? Find it strange the old 460 GTX is included in the benchmark from Nvidia camp while the 5850 equivalent AMD card isn't. I guess the 5870 is fairly close in performance level so it's not a genuinely worrying omission.

I have a Radeon HD 5850 but we dumped the card some time ago along with quite a few other cards to help make the graphs easier to follow. The 5850 is a previous generation card that performs very similar to the 5870 as you pointed out so by providing the 5870 data most can easily work out how the 5850 should perform.

lawfer said:
I found this game not to be demanding at all. Pretty much any decent, and even somewhat decent card can handle it just fine. My friend has a laptop which he uses for homework, and has an Nvidia GT240M, and he has played this little gem without much of a problem. I assume any self respectable desktop can also handle this game.

For such a big, complex game, I found it to be quite stable too. And its great because it is accessible to almost any gamer. Also, great job on the review, really liked the little background of Adam on the graphs.

If you look at our article it really depends on the resolution. I am not sure what resolution your friend is gaming at but it’s certainly not 1680x1050 with a GT 240M graphics card. With maximum quality settings at 1680x1050 the GTX 550 Ti averaged just 44fps and a GT 240M is significantly slower than this graphics card.

sarcasm said:
Any chance of memory bandwidth benchmarks? I know it doesn't matter to some folks, but It'd be interesting to see if faster memory makes any difference in modern games.

Otherwise, good analysis and I particularly enjoy the wide variety of CPU's tested.

There is no way to easily test this as the data for one platform is completely irrelevant for the next. I can tell you that the LGA1156, LGA1155 and LGA1366 platforms are not heavily dependent on memory bandwidth. If you look at the results here you will see the Core i7 2600K delivers very much the same performance with 1600MHz memory as it does with 2129MHz memory.

http://www.legionhardware.com/articles_pages/ddr3_memory_roundup,11.html
 
Steve said:

lawfer said:
I found this game not to be demanding at all. Pretty much any decent, and even somewhat decent card can handle it just fine. My friend has a laptop which he uses for homework, and has an Nvidia GT240M, and he has played this little gem without much of a problem. I assume any self respectable desktop can also handle this game.

For such a big, complex game, I found it to be quite stable too. And its great because it is accessible to almost any gamer. Also, great job on the review, really liked the little background of Adam on the graphs.

If you look at our article it really depends on the resolution. I am not sure what resolution your friend is gaming at but it’s certainly not 1680x1050 with a GT 240M graphics card. With maximum quality settings at 1680x1050 the GTX 550 Ti averaged just 44fps and a GT 240M is significantly slower than this graphics card.

Well, he's not exactly a "gamer." He did play the first Deus Ex, so he had to get this one. The laptop he uses is not a gaming laptop, although it has somewhat decent specs for what it is (it's an Acer Aspire). I'm not sure what resolution he's running, but I do know his laptop is 15.6". With that screen size then I must assume he's playing the highest resolution that such screen size allows, which would then be--usually, that is--1366 x 768.

And, of course, frame rate is irrevocably dependent on resolution; but the main point is, that the game is not really as demanding (specially with multi-core setups, which are the norm nowadays), and still provides the eye-candy of most modern games. Not to mention it is very stable.

And NONE of this is bad at all. ;)
 
Ouch. I'm running a GTX 460 1gb model OC to 900mhz combined with my i5 2500k at stock settings and I'm pulling framerates that are either equivalent or greater than my friend's 6870 with an i5. I don't think the 5870 is quite in the ballpark of the "old" 460.

A bit off topic but....

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/180?vs=164

In fact the 5850 beats the newer 460 in quite a lot of benchmarks.
Bear in mind that many of the 6xxx cards from AMD are just re-branded model numbers even though they were based on a new core(can't remember but think this was around the time of AMD switching ATI branded products to AMD) and don't offer performance increases at all. For example If I remember correctly the 5850 often beats the 6850 card. After checking it isn't far off the performance of the 6870 offering ( http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/295?vs=290 ). Also keep in mind that the performance of Nvidia and AMD products varies across games as often they are TWIMTBP (The way its meant to be played), i.e. developed closely with support from Nvidia. And sometimes they are games developed closely with support from AMD. This usually results in those games running slightly better on the cards from the company that is partnered with the game (optimized coding, insider knowledge allowing for optimized driver releases from AMD/Nvidia).

Steve said:
I have a Radeon HD 5850 but we dumped the card some time ago along with quite a few other cards to help make the graphs easier to follow. The 5850 is a previous generation card that performs very similar to the 5870 as you pointed out so by providing the 5870 data most can easily work out how the 5850 should perform.
Yeah, basically realised this by the time I'd finished typing my reply :)
 
Hmm, My Asus G73 with a GTX460M runs this game at 55-60fps without issue (that's at 1920x1080 with everything on full including tesselation etc). To me, that does not really seem like a DX11 title that is going to fully utilize the power high-end hardware at all.
 
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