Deus Ex: Human Revolution Performance Analysis

By Don Woligroski
published

The highly anticipated prequel to the game that started it all, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is now available. We take a close look at this intriguing title, the first to offer in-game morphological anti-aliasing and AMD HD3D support upon its release.

Benchmark Results: CPUs

Let’s see how Deus Ex: Human Revolution reacts to different processor clock rates: 

Performance is clearly tied to frequency on these quad-core processors, although the game shows a clear preference for Intel’s Sandy Bridge architecture. The Core i5 at 3 GHz demonstrates a big advantage over the Phenom II X4 at 3.5 GHz. However, it's important to note that all of the minimum frame rates are above 40 FPS.

Now let’s see how the game reacts to different numbers of execution cores, and Hyper-Threading technology:

There’s a huge drop in performance between the quad-core i5-2500K and the dual-core, Hyper-Threaded Core i3-2100 at the same clock rate, suggesting that this engine is optimized for threading. Having said that, there’s no notable difference between the Phenom II X4 and X6, so the game does not appear to use more than four cores. At less than four cores, Phenom II performance is drastically reduced, and the dual-core model doesn’t satisfy at all.

Don Woligroski
121 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Soma42
    Man as much as I prefer PC gaming I can't wait for the PS4 and Xbox 720 to come out so games will look noticeably better. Might actually want to upgrade my computer by then...

    Anywho, I didn't play the first two am I missing anything if I wanted to pick this up?
    Reply
  • festerovic
    @soma - I personally thought they were average - good, for the time. Not sure if they would stand up to time...

    Interesting to read the dual core HT chips outperformed real cores. Can we look forward to the 2600's HT being utilized in games before the next generation of CPUs comes out?
    Reply
  • haplo602
    nice review, finaly a new DeusEx game for me :-)
    Reply
  • Was AMD dual-core optimizer installed?
    Reply
  • gerchokas
    Good article - i still remember when i first saw the 2000' Deus Ex graphics on my friend's then-brand-new pc, i thought 'maaan... this looks *friggin* REAL!' I instantly knew my old Pentium cpu needed replacing ASAP...
    11 years later, i praise again the great graphics.. but this time they havent cought me off-guard!
    Reply
  • tacoslave
    i really wonder how far developers can take the graphics in 3 years.
    Reply
  • aznshinobi
    Hmm... The Nvidia cards perform better than the AMD cards of equivalent rank. I'm not playing fanboy but didn't AMD fund the studio? Afterall Eyefinity was made use of.
    Reply
  • th3loonatic
    Are there any typos? Coz I see a GTX560 Ti listed as a card used to test, but it doesn't appear in the results.
    Reply
  • fyasko
    festerovic@soma - I personally thought they were average - good, for the time. Not sure if they would stand up to time...Interesting to read the dual core HT chips outperformed real cores. Can we look forward to the 2600's HT being utilized in games before the next generation of CPUs comes out?
    HT isn't the reason dual core SB CPU's beat 6 core thubans. SB is a better architecture. Hurry up Bulldozer!
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1
    @ Don Woligroski
    i want the CPU benchmarks at 1080p with highest settings.
    benches at 1024x768 are irrelevant. the gamer of today is atleast 1680, preferable 1080.
    so please add to the benches. also, this would show the real impact of CPU on FPS.
    Reply