Geeky Graphics Gandering

Yep. Struggling a little with the last part of that attempt at alliteration :-).

This one might get a little geeky so bear with me :-) There are shiny screenshots coming ... These are all going to be from Deus Ex Mankind Divided, which came out in 2016 and I mentioned it briefly on Monday too. I had the daft idea of doing a little screenshot comparison. Here's what it was like 4 years ago :

You'll definitely want to click for bigger on these to get the detail. That was on my last machine, which at the time was powered by an Intel i5-2500k chip and an AMD Radeon R9 380 graphics card running the game at 1080p. I bounced off the game back then due to bugs, including a nasty crash to desktop bug caused by the AMD card not liking some of the lighting effects on show. The game also manages to be far more clunky to play than the one that came before due to opening up the gameplay more. That just sounds wrong doesn't it ... but whereas Deus Ex Human Revolution was a beauty of a game to play because what it did was limited, it did that superbly well ... Mankind Divided manages to make it awkward.

A quick aside - there have been a series of games in the Deus Ex universe, in release order :
Deus Ex - came out in 2000, set in 2052 and was way ahead of its time. A mix of rpg, action, fps, stealth, letting you choose the way you wanted to succeed in each mission. I need to play this one.
Deus Ex 2 Invisible War - came out in 2003, set in 2072. It went back to more shooty gameplay apparently and isn't recommended.
Deus Ex Human Revolution - released in 2011, set in 2027. I loved this game and sunk 216 wonderful hours into it over several play throughs. I like the characters, the story and the gameplay is limited ... but wonderful.

Deus Ex Mankind Divided - released in 2016, set in 2029. Not quite sure what to think of this one, need to play it more before making a decision over whether to finish it.
(There's also Deus Ex The Fall and Deus Ex Go but we don't talk about those).

Screenies ? A table first :

I looted that from an article on Bit-Tech, which I'd recommend reading if you're interested in more of a subjective comparison with benchmark numbers ... I think some of their numbers are limited by their processor though. If the fps numbers are exactly the same across a set of different cards, then the graphics card isn't what's holding things up.

We'll start off with Low settings ... and to make this set of screenshots I was working off a quick save and then taking the screenshot not long after reloading with different settings. The machine is Meltdown, running with a Ryzen 5 3600 with 32GB coupled with a 3GB 1060 graphics card. I'll come back to that later. They were all taken at 2560x1440 aka 1440p.

That's low, which turns off all the fancy options and works off the lowest quality textures. A game like this will have a flat picture that is the basic texture and then it'll paint the textures over a surface map. Lighting and obstructions will be added and the texture sharpened up by Anisotropic Filtering. The more fancy effects, the more power is needed to put the picture on the screen ... preferably as many times per second as possible because that gives you smoother gameplay.

Moving on to Medium and introduction of Volumetric Lighting and Bloom instantly make themselves known by how much brighter the scene is. This is what partly confused me about the 2016 screenshot, I thought I must have taken it later on in the game because the sandstorm was apparently blocking out more of the light. Check out the rays of the sun too. Mind you, I think some of the detail is actually being lost due to the bloom being a little too bright.

This is High and to be honest, I'm struggling to see the differences here. The table is saying that this level introduced Screenspace Reflections plus Anti-aliasing (smoothing of lines), Motion Blur (nope, turn it off), Sharpen, Cloth Physics and Subspace Scattering. I suspect I'd notice the Cloth Physics most of all that and the reflection in the water (middle left) are better defined. The texture on the floor is also a little more detailed.

Moving on to Very High and this is where the game starts telling me off for having a graphics card with insufficient memory ... This level adds in Tessellation, increases the Ambient Occlusion (not drawing stuff that's covered up), Contact Hardening Shadows, increases Depth of Field and Shadow Quality. I think the game was starting to have some issues at this point. I think the lighting was a little better again here, looking at the half submerged triangle thing. Depth of Field shows up with there being many more trees on the shoreline and there are differences in the shadows on the buildings too.

Last one for this series, this is Ultra, with all of the nice things turned on. I can't actually see much difference in this scene to be honest ... can you ?

I have a couple more, from where I am currently in the game. It's early days still ...

That's Ultra, which was chugging a bit and I wouldn't have wanted to play the game for long at this setting due to framerates. It can be ok for wandering around but you need those frames when the shooting happens not so much for smooth pictures, you need it for smooth gameplay.

And the same scene at High. The big difference I'm seeing is in the quality of the shadows plus Ultra sees sharper detail in the cobblestones. And a weird change in the quickbar thing too apparently ... Ultra also fuzzies things down a bit as well with the shadows and lighting.

A couple more ... here's how the system was on Ultra :

And on High :

It's not using the cpu as much as it could and the cpu usage is around the same for both Ultra and High. But the big difference is in the graphics thing below. In High, the card is approaching its capability limit which is the point where it'll start slowing things down. In Ultra, the card is maxed out.

Time for dinner for me now but I hope you like all the shiny pictures. As far as Deus Ex Mankind Divided goes :
It is nicely shiny and detailed compared to Human Revolution. Definitely a good upgrade there in terms of environments and how the game shows them off.
Human Revolution looked fantastic when it came out but the people didn't look great and the environments were simplified. Mankind Divided benefits from 5 years of rapid improvement in graphics technology.
The gameplay somehow went backwards and might be why I walk away before finishing the game.
I haven't come across characters I took to like Farida and Pritchard yet. I usually go non-lethal for Human Revolution ... except for one sequence where I don't know how to save Farida without going lethal. Cos I like that one.
It's worth playing around a bit with the settings to see what's worth boosting.

But not tonight cos I'm hungry.

Actually chicken and mushroom pastry things tonight because I like to munch those first from what I get on a shopping run.

Stay safe, be well !