Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Scores DirectX 12 Patch, But Don’t Expect Anything Significant

The long-awaited DirectX 12 patch for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has arrived, and as much as I hate to admit it, it couldn’t be more underwhelming. The lone DX12 feature included here is the fact that the API is supported; that means performance might be improved in some cases, but the visuals remain unchanged. Multi-GPU support is not featured either, although it’s mentioned that it is en route.

The biggest reason I find this DirectX 12 roll out so underwhelming is that it’s been a long time coming. When I met with AMD late last fall, I was told that this game would be supporting DirectX 12 at launch. As it turned out, it didn’t, but I am not going to nitpick over the matter of two weeks. Still, for that long wait, it sure would have been nice to see more than a 5% performance improvement when the performance was already over 60 FPS.

Straight from AMD:

Per these results, a performance boost of 1-2 FPS on the Fury X can be expected. On the RX 480, a more significant gain can be seen: up to 3.6 FPS. But, it’s important to note that these are 1080p results; higher-end resolutions are unlikely to show the same level of improvement.

A breakdown of performance:

AMD wins hands-down in DirectX 12 tests, which is something I think we all expected. But while the RX 480 beats out the GTX 1070 in DX12 (by 2.4 FPS), the roles are reversed in DX11: the GTX 1070 bests the RX 480 by 9 FPS.

Ultimately, what all of this means is that whether you’re an AMD or NVIDIA user, you’re not going to see a huge difference in performance one way or another. Because there’s no visual difference between DX12 and DX11, your options are simple: stick to DX11 for NVIDIA, and move to DX12 for AMD.

Even if you’re an NVIDIA user, you might want to update to this patch and just keep DirectX 12 disabled, as it includes a number of bug fixes as well. To do so, open up Steam, right-click the game, and click on Properties. From there, you can click on the Beta tab and choose the DirectX 12 option from the drop-down. Steam will need to download about 100MB to make the conversion happen.

If only this were a Vulkan patch; it might actually feel exciting. For what it’s worth, though, some reddit users are experiencing greater gains on older hardware (such as the R9 290), so if you’re an AMD user, you really shouldn’t hesitate to update to the DirectX 12 patch. There are no caveats to be concerned about for anyone but NVIDIA users.