We were pleasantly surprised by how well Deus Ex: Human Revolution ran on affordable graphics cards at 1680x1050. The GeForce GTX 550 Ti and Radeon HD 6770 were able to deliver playable performance using maximum visual quality settings. Moreover, it only took a Radeon HD 6850 or GeForce GTX 560 for silky smooth performance.

Although I have noticed quite a few complaints about the graphics in Deus Ex: Human Revolution I believe they are pretty impressive. Granted this is not the most amazing looking game of 2011, but the visuals are still very good.

Despite the fact the game doesn't support the traditional multi-sampling or super-sampling anti-aliasing methods, we found that MLAA and FXAA both looked very good. In terms of performance there was very little between the two for the most part, and when using an AMD graphics card we failed to find any difference at all. Nvidia users should stick with FXAA as it will likely guarantee the best performance.

When looking at processor performance we found that the clock speed had little influence on frame rates. Based on our findings any processor capable of supporting just two threads is going to perform poorly on Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The game was able to utilize more than four threads, but any of today’s quad-core processors should more than suffice, whether it's an AMD Phenom II X4 or Intel Core i3/i5/i7.

Those hoping to play at high resolutions such as 2560x1600 or across multiple monitors using the highest possible visuals, will likely need to take advantage of multi-GPU technology. The good news is from day one Crossfire and SLI technology worked flawlessly using the latest AMD and Nvidia drivers.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution looks to be a fairly well-polished game and it's certainly been sometime since we were able to provide a complete performance analysis on a game without having to wait for a series of patches. That being said, the game did receive its first patch just 3 days after release which addressed start up crashes and lengthy load times.