Date:
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Author:
Grady McKinney
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Deus Ex: The Missing Link - Performance and IQ Review

Deus Ex: The Missing Link, developed by Eidos Montreal and published by Square Enix, is the first of hopefully several downloadable expansions for Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The DLC provides 5 hours of gameplay, new characters, new conspiracies, and fuel for existing ones, as well as a polished game engine with improved graphics and performance.

Introduction

On October 18th, Deus Ex: Human Revolution - The Missing Link was released for the PC. Developed by Eidos Montreal and published by Square Enix this piece of downloadable content uses the same engine as Deus Ex: Human Revolution. You do not have to have beaten Deus Ex: Human Revolution in order to play The Missing Link, however you do need to own the original game. Metacritic currently has Deus Ex: The Missing Link with a score of 76/100 while Human Revolution holds a score of 89/100. The Missing Link is currently available for purchase on Steam for $14.99.

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Deus Ex: Human Revolution - The Missing Link

In Deus Ex: Human Revolution - The Missing Link you find out what happened during the three days that Adam Jensen falls off the grid after entering a cargo crate when leaving Hengsha, the second time in, Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The plot brings in new characters that work with the original plot of the game and fuel the conspiracy theories that have been forming. The game starts with Adam being interrogated and tortured by Belltower agents while his augments are disabled and useless. You must use the stealth skills learned from Human Revolution to escape and unravel the mystery surrounding the facility.

DXHR: The Missing Link provides 5 hours of new gameplay and content which includes new environments, new characters, new enemies, new conspiracies and the need to re-build your augments to suit your style of play and help you get out alive.

"We are thrilled to bring Deus Ex: The Human Revolution - The Missing Link to fans," said David Anfossi, producer of the DLC. "This unique DLC provides an enhanced Deus Ex: The Human Revolution experience with deeper insight into the conspiracy, visual improvements, new characters and enemies, and a twist on some gameplay elements."

Improvements to Graphics

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - The Missing Link uses the same game engine as Human Revolution, but with a few noticeable improvements. The first thing we noticed were the better looking graphics in the opening scene, as well as a larger performance hit due to tessellation working more. There is improved texture quality throughout the entire game, improving upon what we experienced in the full game. We found that cut scenes when you engage in conversation take a larger drop in performance than we originally saw in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Tessellation also seemed more efficient during normal gameplay with guards and prisoners seeming more realistic and unique.

The weather system and lighting system are also improved, and look amazing when combined together. There are several places during the game that they work together to create exhilarating environments. You can read more about the Deus Ex: Human Revolution engine in our full gameplay and performance review here.

Configuring and Testing Deus Ex: The Missing Link

DXHR: The Missing Link uses all of the same graphics options as Deus Ex: Human Revolution. For all testing we were able to use FXAA High, the anti-aliasing mode that provided the best picture on all objects in game. FXAA High does not suffer a huge performance drop like traditional AA settings, which are not available in this game. The SSAO, or Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion, setting has the single greatest impact on performance, sometimes up to 50%. SSAO improves shadowing of all objects in game. You can read more about the rest of the settings in our gameplay and performance review of Deus Ex: Human Revolution here.

To test DXHR: The Missing Link we first played all the way through the game, including every side-quest we could find. After testing the whole game we decided to start our run through at the bottom of the elevator going in to the underwater restricted wing. We have two cut scene conversations where tessellation is active, and performance drops. Our test also includes a door hack, ladder climbing, duct crawling, and grenade explosions. Our ideal compromise between image quality and performance to be considered playable is around 40 FPS or above.

We did experience an issue with SLI in which we did not get any noticeable performance gain in Deus Ex: Human Revolution - The Missing Link. We loaded up the full version of Human Revolution and immediately saw a performance gain with SLI enabled. However, in The Missing Link we saw no improvement in performance with SLI, it performed exactly the sam as a single-GPU. In order to make SLI work in this game we had to manually create a profile and force SLI.

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In the image above we are on the Program Settings tab under Manage 3D Settings in the NVIDIA control panel. To configure DXHR: The Missing Link we simply clicked the Add button, and navigated to the games executable file and selected it. We also needed to change the SLI rendering mode to force Alternate Frame Rendering 2. With AFR 1 selected we received half the performance of a single NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 and the game was unplayable. After enabling AFR 2 manually we did receive the performance expected from SLI. There is a possibility of visual anomalies occurring when changing these settings, however we did not witness any. We also tried NVIDIA's 285.62 WHQL driver, but that driver does not provide a built in profile for The Missing Link either. Therefore, the only way to get SLI performance is to manually create a profile and force AFR 2 if you have an SLI setup.