Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Benchmarked - Bang for Buck

If you're seeking an upgrade to play the new Deus Ex, you'll likely be interested in getting the best value for money. As such, for each resolution we've created a bang per buck graph.

This is calculated by first normalising the average FPS from the 'High' settings run-through of that resolution (since the developers recommend this as the best trade-off between performance and quality). There are many different ways you can do this, but ours considers an average frame rate of 60fps to be the ideal target. Cards scoring higher than this will get a higher rating, but frames over 60fps count for less since their real-world impact would be less. Equally, anything with 20fps or less would score zero as there's no hope of a card being useful if it cannot reach this average at a given resolution. We then take the lowest available retail price (or the closest available alternative if the exact card is no longer on sale) and divide the normalised FPS by this. Again, this is just one way of achieving this, and there are obviously many more cards on the market than those that we've tested, but it does provide a handy at-a-glance summary of the cards that are giving you the best performance that really matters for the best price.


As expected, the new Polaris cards do very well at 1080p. Their frame rates are very solid and the 4GB Sapphire card is particularly cost-effective, although it is frustratingly difficult to find. Recent price drops mean that the GTX 970 is a decent option, but current generation Nvidia cards aren't very good value. That said, there are cheaper GTX 1060s than the Founders Edition, often with overclocks, so it's not as bad as it may look here.


AMD dominates bang per buck at 1440p as well. Older cards like the R9 Fury and R9 390 can be found for great prices at the moment, though you'll need to consider the lack of modern features. The relatively low price of the Polaris GPUs also really helps them out again, although it should be noted that they're really being pushed to their limits at this resolution. You can find SKUs for less than the pricey MSI GTX 1070 we tested, but there's no denying it's an expensive GPU. Nonetheless, it's a strong performer at this resolution and is likely to remain so for some time - we'd say it's the best current generation option here.


To play games comfortably at 4K you're going to need to invest some serious cash. The GTX 1080 emerges best by our metrics - the Titan X is considerably faster, but also ridiculously pricey.