I never played Deus Ex, so I'm judging solely by the published videos and frames. The effect seems quite bad and unnatural to me. In the 1st side by side comparison, for example, the block blends with the terrain in a way that it shows its corners reflection on the terrain. Shouldn't be there some hierarchies coded so that the sand blends with the block base without looking like the block is penetrating into the terrain? Also, the 2nd video example shows some evident perspective errors wrt parallax. If this is the alternative, I would choose any day the basic hard-intersection version.