Deus Ex: Mankind Divided DX11 Video Card Benchmarks

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Graphics Memory Usage

Using an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 8GB Founders Edition graphics card we ran the games built-in benchmark to see how much memory (frame buffer) was being used at various image quality settings.

For this section of the article we’ll be looking at high, very high and ultra preset we disabled VSync and left MSAA off. The differences between each image quality preset setting can be seen in the second screenshot above.

We’ve seen on Steam that many gamers are reporting performance issues when playing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on Very High/Ultra settings with MSAA set to 2x, 4x, or 8x. This game title is very demanding with MSAA turned off. If you are experiencing performance issues, here are a few workarounds you can try out for now:
– Turn off MSAA
– Turn off Contact Hardening Shadows
– Keep Volumetric Lighting to on or off
– If you have a 4GB GPU, keep settings up to High
– Keep resolution to 1080p
– Enable Exclusive Fullscreen

As you can see from the frame buffer usage chart, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has pretty decent memory requirements. When using High image quality settings we see that it uses a full 2GB of frame buffer at 1080P and moving up Ultra image quality settings used close to 3.6GB of memory. The good news is that most recent video cards have over 3GB of memory on them. For example the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB has enough frame buffer to play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided at 1080P at high or very high image quality settings without issues. If you play on a 1440P display you’ll want to have at least 3GB of video card memory and ideally 4GB. For the 1% of gamers that have a 4K gaming display you’ll be used over 5.5 GB of frame buffer with ultra image quality settings. Most of the AMD and NVIDIA flagship video cards have 6-8GB of memory on them, but there are cards like the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X that have just 4GB of memory.

Since we tested three different image quality settings on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 8GB Founders Edition graphics cards we might as well show you the benchmark results as well. Here you can see that the GeForce GTX 1080 FE is best run with ‘Very High’ image quality settings in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided as the minimum frame rate never dropped below 60 FPS. This is a very demanding game title as the GTX 1080 could barely average 60 FPS with the Ultra present on a 1080P display.

When moving up to the popular 2560 x 1440 display resolution you can see that the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 8GB Founders Edition can’t average 60 FPS on the top three image quality settings. You can average 60 FPS on medium settings, but there is a pretty significant difference between low/medium and high/very high/ultra. You buy a high-end card like the GeForce GTX 1080 to crank up the image quality settings and not run games at medium IQ settings!

Running Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on a single GeForce GTX 1080 8GB graphics card with the reference clock speeds will give you 30 FPS with high image quality settings. Here is an example of a game title that a single NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 can’t handle at 4K with decent image quality settings. You’ll need to run a multi-GPU SLI setup or reduce the image quality settings to low to be able to run this game title at 4K resolutions.

Now that we know more about the frame buffer needs of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, let’s take a look at performance of a handful of cards at ‘High’ image quality settings. We picked to run just ‘High’ image quality settings due to how tough this game title is to render and we feel that most gamers will try to target this setting.