Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Graphics Study

Adrian Courreges did a study of the graphics for Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

The original Deus Ex is among the most critically acclaimed PC games of its time and I spent countless hours helping JC Denton fend off the conspiracies of UNATCO or the Illuminati.

I never had the chance to play the second opus “Invisible War”, but I gave a shot to “Human Revolution” when it was released. All I can say is: it lived up to the expectations!

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a game released in 2011 by Square Enix, and developed by Eidos Montréal and Nixxes for the PC version. It uses a modified version of the Crystal engine made by Crystal Dynamics and was one of the earliest games to support DirectX 11.

It featured great graphics at the time (still looks good!), and it was as beautiful as light-weight: even low-budget video cards could run the game smoothly.

I was curious about the rendering process, so I spent a few hours reverse-engineering the game, playing with Renderdoc. Here are the results of my investigation.