Deus Ex Mankind Divided was one of the best looking games of 2016 and it’s quite intriguing to revisit this title on the PlayStation 4 Pro. From a technical perspective, the Dawn engine was a highlight of 2016 and we are quite eager to see how IO Interactive will use it in future Deus Ex games. Having said that, the engine is power hungry and the developers had to resort to using custom techniques while developing the PS4 Pro version.
Deus Ex Mankind Divided uses checkerboard rendering in order to achieve a full native 4K resolution. However unlike other titles that use the same solution, there is a dynamic buffer in place. This means that the game scales between 3200 X 1800 to a full native 4K i.e. 3240 x 2160 resolution. Frame rate target remains the same as the base version which is 30fps. Frame rate drops are observed at times but we are largely looking at a solid 30 frame per second experience throughout. For comparison purpose, a GTX 1080 which has 8GB of GPU memory runs the game at an average of 34 frames per second with every setting maxed out. The PS4 Pro version does not have its graphical settings notched up to Ultra compared to the PC version…it largely remains close to the High setting equivalent but the results are quite impressive.
Compared to the base version, the PS4 Pro features better screen space reflections, higher shadow quality and better anti-aliasing in some scenes. Deus Ex Mankind Divided was already a good looking game so the changes are quite subtle. However the fact remains that the Pro version provides a tremendous boost to the image quality whilst maintaining a similar performance level compared to its base version.
