Introduction

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I’ve been playing through Deus Ex Mankind Divided recently and have noticed some strangeness with the performance relative to the graphical fidelity. Considering my rig, I thought I shouldn’t have much of an issue locking 120hz. So, I decided to delve deeper…

Specs

The specs of the machine used in this testing is:

• Intel Core i7 8700K @ 5GHz core & 4.4GHz cache (Delidded w/ copper IHS)
• Noctua NH-D15
• Gigabyte Aorus Z370 Gaming 7
• 32GB Corsair LPX DDR4-2800
• EVGA Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080Ti FTW 3
• 480GB SanDisk Ultra SSD Boot Drive
• 960GB PNY CS1311 SSD Data Drive
• SeaSonic Prime Titanium 850W

Testing Notes

An interesting thing I noticed was that performance was lower if you used lower quality textures, so all the following tests were done using ultra quality textures. I didn’t directly test this observation in the benchmarking route though. I also used a FOV of 90 for each test along with DirectX 11 instead of DirectX 12. Each graphical preset was also tested with manually set affinity. The affinity thing came about from when I was playing the game at one point I decided to see if I could mitigate stuttering during asset loading. My observations when I first did that were based upon a static scene and not me moving around and I did see an improved framerate which didn’t translate to the benchmark route.

Framerate was logged with FRAPS and other stats were logged with HWINFO64. A program called FLAT was used to turn the FRAPS data into charts and my amateur Excel skills were used to chart the HWINFO64 data. I apologize in advance for not using my typical interactive charts for this article.

The NavJack settings were essentially Ultra settings but without:

• Chromatic Aberration
• Depth of Field
• Motion Blur
• Any AA
• Bloom
• Lens Flare

Testing

Everything was automatic. I could sit in the red-leather driver’s seat and make every inch of the car jump, by touching the proper buttons. It was a wonderful machine: Ten grand worth of gimmicks and big-priced Special Effects. The rear-windows leaped up with a touch, like frogs in a dynamite pond. The white canvas top ran up and down like a roller-coaster. The dashboard was full of esoteric lights & dials & meters that I would never understand — but there was no doubt in my mind I was in a superior machine.

Hunter S Thompson

The Benchmark Route

Low settings

Medium Settings

High Settings

Very High Settings

Ultra Settings

NavJack Settings (Custom)

Conclusion

We’re fucked! Games are too hard to run on high-end hardware! Nvidia priced me out of an upgrade and I’m ANGREY! I’m going to move to Intel dGPUs for now on! See you in the next article!