Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has some pretty big shoes to fill. Not only is it one of 2016's most hyped video games, but 2011's Deus Ex: Human Revolution is also a hard act to follow having received very positive reviews among reviewers and gamers alike.

Hard to believe it was five years ago, but back then we put Human Revolution through its paces using 22 GPUs and a range of CPUs and we were pleasantly surprised by how well the game ran on affordable graphics cards despite the impressive visuals. At the time, graphics cards including the GeForce GTX 550 Ti and Radeon HD 6770 were able to deliver playable performance using maximum visual quality settings at modest resolutions.

Horrible ports have become the norm in recent years though, so we've been a bit concerned about how Mankind Divided might turn out. As before, Square Enix has handed the job to Nixxes Software, the same outfit that took care of Human Revolution and more recently Rise of the Tomb Raider.

Granted, Tomb Raider wasn't flawless on arrival, but Nixxes did whip the game into shape quite quickly, so we're hoping for the best when it comes to Mankind Divided.

Mankind Divided is built on the "Dawn Engine," which is derived from the proprietary IO Interactive Glacier 2 game engine used in Hitman: Absolution. Point being, like Hitman, Mankind Divided will support DirectX 12, though that will be patched in at a later date (AMD says September 4). Along with DX12, the game features an extensive library of AMD technologies such as TressFX 3.0.

Taking that into consideration, today's testing is naturally limited to DirectX 11 with plans to revisit Mankind Divided performance in September. With that, let's discuss how we'll be testing the game...

Testing Methodology

Our job has been made quite a bit easier thanks to Mankind Divided's built-in benchmark. The test runs for roughly 90 seconds and we found it to be an accurate representation of actual gameplay performance.

Due to the game's very demanding hardware requirements, which you are about to see, we decided to test a number of different configurations. Using the 'Ultra' and 'Very High' quality presets, it only made sense to test the game with high-end GPUs and we did so at 1080p, 1440p and 4K. We then tested 38 graphics cards in all price ranges and compared them using the 'Medium' quality preset at 1080p.

Graphics cards were tested using the latest display drivers: AMD Crimson Edition 16.8.2 Hotfix and GeForce Game Ready Driver 372.54 WHQL.

Test System Specs