Deus Ex: Mankind Divided PC GPU (DX11 and DX12) performance benchmark review - DirectX 12: Performance Patch Update

The DirectX 12 Patch Update

On September 8th a new Beta patch has been made available for Deus eX, allowing opening up the DirectX 12 API. In Steam please go to the game properties and select BETAs:
   

 
Enabling DirectX 12 for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is fast and simple. Launch Steam and right-click the game from the Steam library to open the properties menu. A new window will open and under the betas tab, select the DirectX 12 build from the drop down menu to begin downloading and installing the new build.
  

 
Once you startup the game and get the properties page, you can now select DirectX 12 mode (should your graphics card support it). We'll do the charts on the next pages, but for each brand we are going to zoom in a bit and test three cards + look at the performance differences. It is a bit of a mixed bag really, some cards kick in well, others not so much. We test at HIGH image quality settings and no MSAA as we feel that mode offers the best balance inbetween performance and quality. You are going to notice that the cards that do benefit from the DX12 patch and performance modes, up-to 2560x1440 there is a gain in performance. Results vary heavily though and suffice to state once again, the DX12 mode is a BETA.

AMD Radeon (Crimson 16.9.1 / High Quality):

Aboce the RX 480, on average we could add 2~3 FPS, we expected a bit more, especially when you look at the next chart.

The Radeon R9 390, goodness Hawaii ... erhm Grenada is still going strong. We see a handsome performance boost at 1080P as well as 1440P.  At Ultra HD, well you are completely GPU bottlenecked (of course).

FIJI GPUs then, again a nice relative performance boost at 1080P mostly really. You are looking at up-to 10% performance increases at the lower resolutions really. Not bad for a free patch. 

NVIDIA GeForce (GeForce 372.70 / High Quality):

Nvidia then, awkward ... first off, for all cards we use the absolutely latest available driver okay ? Overall the generic picture is that nvidia does not gain from DX12 mode, the GeForce 1080 topped it with a specific drop in perf at 1080P. The release notes that come with the DX12 Beta patch do mention this specifically:

• WARNING: Using the DirectX 12 API can offer better performance on some systems, however, it will not be beneficial on all.
• Multi-GPU is not yet supported in this patch.
• If you encounter problems with DirectX 12, we recommend turning it off again. There are no visual or gameplay differences between the two DirectX versions.
• There is a known bug that causes some very high end cards to regress relative to DirectX 11. This bug is being addressed by the development team.

When we take the GeForce GTX 1060, we see smaller than 1 FPS differences, that would be considered as random anomalies. So Same architecture (Pascal) yet there is no gain in perf. Obviously we do not know 100% what the game developer enabled in the DX12 patch, but let's assume it is ASYNC compute. 

For the Maxwell generation we see similar behaviour, this is the GeForce GTX 980. The performance in-between DX11 and DX12 is more or less the same. Right, next page ... charts in 1080P, 1440P and 2160P.

On the next pages we have charted things up with the most modern graphics cards for DX12.