More Punishing Than We Anticipated
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided doesn't chew up every last bit of system resources like Fallout 4, but it's brutal on the GPU. As a result, many gamers are up in arms about the performance they are seeing on their systems. While I have to admit the performance is more demanding than expected, the game's detailed lighting, shadows and textures are also visually impressive.
Those targeting a minimum of 30fps and willing to use the Medium quality settings can get by with relatively inexpensive hardware, such as the new Radeon RX 460.
This is the first game we've seen where a pair of GTX 1080 graphics cards won't suffice when playing maxed out. Does this make Deus Ex the new Crysis?
Older cards such as the HD 7970 GHz Edition and GTX 780 work well also. Again, the performance isn't quite what you might expect given the quality settings and 1080p resolution, but this is what gamers are faced with.
The Very High quality settings, which in my opinion are just as good as Ultra, require a lot more GPU grunt. Still, AMD's RX 480 provided decent performance at 1080p as did the GTX 1060, though they struggled at 1440p. Gamers running high-end GPUs can get away with Very High at 1440p without much trouble and the R9 Nano was particularly impressive here.
But is gameplay any good? Read the Deus Ex review here.
Bang for your buck, the best value option for playing Mankind Divided goes to the Radeon RX 480. Although I didn't show the results, I did try the RX 480 flashed to the 4GB BIOS and performance was identical to the 8GB model, even when using the Ultra quality preset. This is the first game we've seen where a pair of GTX 1080 graphics cards won't suffice when playing maxed out. Does this make Deus Ex the new Crysis?
When it comes to CPU performance, the game isn't particularly demanding. Any relatively modern Core i5 or Core i7 processor will churn through this game like butter. Higher clocked AMD FX processors aren't bad either, though the Athlon X4 860K did struggle alongside the Intel dual-core processors. That said, Intel's Core i3 processors were impressive to match the FX-9590.
Those running an AMD chip will ideally want to overclock it, while those using an unlocked Intel part have nothing to gain by overclocking.
Before we wrap things up, I wanted to mention that crashing wasn't an issue for us on any of the systems tested. A lot of gamers are complaining about crashes that have been addressed on a patch already, luckily this didn't keep us from testing in spite of the massive number of configurations tested.
Overall, Mankind Divided is more punishing than we anticipated in the graphics department but not unreasonably so for the visuals on display. I have no doubt that future updates will improve things over time, with particular emphasis on what the upcoming DirectX 12 patch might bring to the table.