Deus Ex: Human Revolution Performance Analysis and Preview
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We already know that Deus Ex: Human Revolution uses a heavily modified Crystal Engine by Crystal Dynamics and according to the developers, the game was build with multicores in mind. And they were telling the truth. As we can see, the game scales well to a quadcore system. One core is maxed out and the other three are used at around 40-60%. We tried to simulate a dualcore system by disabling two of our cores and we witnessed a 15fps hit. This basically means that the game will benefit from a quadcore.
Our GPU on the other hand wasn't stressed at all. Nvidia has already an SLI profile for this game and we had 65-120fps at 1080p with maxed out settings under DX9. There were few locations where we saw full GPU usage but most of the time, our GPU usage was averaging around 60-80% (which means that we were CPU limited, even though the game was running with 60+ fps). We also run the GTX295 in Single GPU mode to find out whether Human Revolution is GPU or CPU bound. Thankfully, those of you with older cards will be able to enjoy it, as we lost only 4-5fps. This clearly shows that Human Revolution is CPU bound and will run fine under DX9, even with a single GTX275. We should also note that we would get better image quality in SLI mode -without suffering any performance hit at all-, if there wasn't any limitation to the shadow quality setting. So let's just hope that the developers will remove it in the final build.
Meanwhile, the editors at Plughead have put out the first part of their hands-on preview. A small sampling:
I mentioned this briefly in my First Impressions, but I'll elaborate on it now: I'm not exaggerating when I say that it's really possible to play Human Revolution exactly as you'd play games as diverse as Call of Duty, Gears of War or Splinter Cell: Conviction. Just venture into the Options screen and you can setup your most comfortable layout for your style of game. Iron Sights on Right Mouse, ignore the cover button Call of Duty. Set cover to Toggle and Sprint to Spacebar, you've got a partially first-person Gears. Cover to Hold and on the Right Mouse Button, sticking to stealth but not avoiding firefights, hello Sam Fisher.
Those are just examples for the current crop of gamers: there's all the various options you can get from regular Deus Ex too. Want to play as a stealthy hacker? A gun-toting inventory hog with a silver tongue? An augmented superhero killing machine? Even more so than the original game, Human Revolution gives you an astonishing array of playstyles and simply lets you pick and choose how you want to play. It absolutely never punishes you for picking shooting over stealth (it's your choice after all), but doing it one way will cut off rewards or conversation options if you did it differently. There is literally no right way to play Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it's entirely up to you.
