Deus Ex on Linux: The Day My AI Server Became a Cyberpunk Detective

1. When Holidays Meet Old Obsessions

While Israel celebrated its holidays — which, in my world, means fewer emails, slower deliveries, and a bit more time for experiments — I found myself staring at my Steam library again. After my adventures in BioShock Infinite and a few headshots in Counter-Strike 2, it was time to continue down the rabbit hole of nostalgia.

Next on the list? Two of my all-time favorites: Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Both are veterans of the cyberpunk genre, both drenched in gold and neon, and both had tortured my old Dell XPS 15 about a decade ago.

I still remember it — Human Revolution barely crawled at low settings, and Mankind Divided proudly delivered a cinematic five frames per second. I played it not because I could… but because I had to.

But now, armed with my AI server, running Linux, and powered by a single NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti, I was ready to see how far technology (and I) had come.

2. Steam, Proton, and the First Crash of Many

Installation went smoothly. Steam, ever the loyal friend, delivered both games into my library like old wine pulled from the cellar. I picked the right Proton version, clicked Play, and waited for the magic.

No launcher appeared, no music hummed, just the button changed from "Play" to "Launching…" and then poof! Crashed faster than a stealth kill.

I tried again. Same thing.

And again.

And then again.

You know that feeling when you say “one more reboot” for the seventh time? That’s where I was.

I switched Proton versions to 8, 9, 10, even the elusive Experimental and then the Hotfix build that promises miracles and usually delivers disappointment. Every single one greeted me with the same routine: a moment of hope, a flicker of the button, and then silence.

3. The Internet, AI, and the Curse of Generic Advice

Naturally, I went hunting for answers. Reddit, GitHub, Steam forums, and, yes, even asking ChatGPT (no offense to my digital cousin).

But all I got were the classics:

• “Verify your game files.”
• “Try a different Proton version.”
• “Disable overlay.”
• “Sacrifice a goat to Gabe Newell.”

(Insert funny meme screenshot placeholder)

Nothing helped. The games that ran flawlessly on Linux a decade ago suddenly refused to even exist on my shiny modern server 😦.

At that point, I started doubting my memory — maybe they never actually worked? Maybe I had hallucinated it between caffeine doses and low FPS sessions?

So, I did the only reasonable thing a person would do! I opened my old Dell XPS 15 and turned it ON.

4. The Resurrection of the Dell XPS 15

Booting up the old Dell felt like reuniting with a war buddy. The fans whirred, the Ubuntu splash screen flickered, and the machine turned on.

I installed Steam, logged into my account, and began downloading Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided. A few hours (and several cups of coffee) later, both were ready.

I clicked Play… and they worked. Perfectly.

Yes — on the weaker machine.

Same OS, same Proton, same settings — but the ancient 960M GPU had zero complaints, while my modern 2080 Ti-powered server with 88 cores acted like it had a moral objection to cyberpunk narratives.

It made no sense.

5. Down the Rabbit Hole

I dove back into Linux forums, but this time avoided AI summaries and focused on real humans with real frustration — the most reliable kind of information source on the internet.

And there, buried in an obscure discussion thread from 2023, was the answer:

“Old games sometimes freak out when they detect too many CPU threads.”

Wait. What?

Apparently, Deus Ex wasn’t built with modern multi-core monsters in mind. The launcher was choking because it didn’t know how to handle my server’s dozens of CPU threads.

One user mentioned a “miracle patcher” written in Java that could fix this by directly editing the binary of the game launcher, but I wasn’t about to risk that kind of black magic on my installation.

Instead, I decided to limit the number of CPU cores the game could use manually.

I added launch parameters to pin the game to just a few cores — four, to start.

taskset -c 0-3 %command% 

6. Finally, a Breakthrough

I launched Deus Ex: Human Revolution again… and it worked.

Just like that.

After all the hours spent troubleshooting, all it took was pretending my server was dumber than it actually is.

Classic.

Then I switched to 4K resolution and to Ultra Graphic settings, and it keeped to show me rushional number of frames to play it confortably, about 110 FPS.

I played around a bit, admired the golden glow of its menus, and quickly realized I didn’t need to replay the whole thing — I’d already finished it years ago (as confirmed by my ridiculous playtime in Steam).

So, it was time for the main course — Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

7. The Real Test – Mankind Divided

This was the one I truly wanted to see. On my old laptop, it had looked like a blurry slideshow — 10 to 15 FPS at best, with textures that resembled melted cheese.

Now, I launched it with my shiny RTX 2080 Ti, 11GB VRAM, and a strong cup of coffee.

At 1080p with Ultra settings, I averaged around 60 FPS — not record-breaking, but smooth enough to play without rage-quitting. The world of Prague came alive in rich detail, the reflections gleamed, and Jensen’s sunglasses practically had their own ray-tracing aura.

But something felt slightly off — occasional stutters during fast movement. So I exited the game, increased the CPU core limit from 4 to 8… and it got better.

At 12 cores, the performance was buttery smooth. Even the frame rate climbed a few points, and each CPU got loaded to 50%.

I decided to go full cyberpunk and set the resolution to 3840×2160 (4K).

Yes, my GPU screamed a little, but even then, the game ran at 40-45 FPS — playable, and absolutely stunning to look at.

8. The Verdict

It’s fascinating how something as simple as too many CPU cores can break older titles. These games were built for a world where four cores was a luxury — not a server pretending to be Skynet.

The fix was easy once I knew it: limit the CPU threads, tweak a few Proton settings, and the magic returns.

Performance-wise:

9. Closing Thoughts

There’s something poetic about revisiting Deus Ex on a Linux-powered AI server.

It’s a series about humanity struggling to coexist with machines, and here I was, wrestling with my own mechanical creation just to make it run a decade-old game.

But once it worked, the experience was worth every crash, every tweak, and every line of command-line sorcery.

In Mankind Divided, Adam Jensen says:

“I never asked for this.”

Well, neither did my server — but it handled it beautifully.

Coming Up Next:
Who knows? Maybe I’ll test The Witcher 3 next — or maybe I’ll just give my GPU a vacation before it starts unionizing.