Deus Ex: Mankind Divided DX12 Patch Broken on NVIDIA Hardware

Ashley Allen / 8 years ago

Initially intended to be available on the day of the game’s release, the DirectX 12 patch for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has been belatedly launched today (8^th September). While it would be reasonable to assume that Eidos Montreal delayed the release of the patch to ensure that it was fully functional, early reports suggest that the DX12 performance of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is actually worse than in DX11, at least when using NVIDIA hardware.

Dark Side of Gaming’s John Papadopoulos reports that when running the game in DX12 using an NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti, he experienced poor frame rates in comparison to DX11.

“[T]hings went downhill once we visited the game’s city hubs. As we can see, there is a significant performance hit under DX12 (we’re talking about a 30fps decrease in some cases),” Papadopoulos wrote. “What’s really interesting here is that the CPU is not the culprit for DX12’s poor performance. We tried simulating a quad-core and our performance was similar to our hexa-core system under DX12.”

“[L]et us tell you that NVIDIA did an amazing job with its DX11 drivers for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided,” Papadopoulos added. “And while this is labelled as a preview build, it does not really excuse the awful performance we’re experiencing in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided under the DX12 API.”

“For the time being, we strongly suggest NVIDIA owners avoiding DX12 at all costs.”

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided DX12 update release notes:

Release of DirectX 12 support in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided:

As of today, users are also able to utilize the awaited DirectX 12 Graphics API. To activate this you are required to do the following:

Within your Steam Library, right-click on Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

Select ‘properties’ from the context menu and navigate to the Beta tab.

From the dropdown menu, select dx12_preview then close the window.

After the game has downloaded the DirectX 12 supported build you can then toggle DirectX 12 from either the launcher window or from the Display options within the game.
Note that DirectX 12 requires a restart of the game if (de-)activated from within a running Deus Ex: Mankind Divided game session.

o WARNING: Using the DirectX 12 API can offer better performance on some systems, however, it will not be beneficial on all.
o Multi-GPU is not yet supported in this patch.
o 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.
o As always, make sure that your drivers are up to date.

Known DirectX 12 issue:
– 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.

While we expect this patch to be an improvement for everyone, if you do have trouble with this patch and prefer to stay on older versions, we have made a Beta available on Steam, v1.0_build524.6, v1.0_build524.7, v1.1_build524.10, v1.2_build524.15 and v1.3_build524.17 that can be used to switch back to previous versions.