DX11: Metro 2033

Metro 2033 is an action-oriented video game with a combination of survival horror, and first-person shooter elements. The game is based on the novel Metro 2033 by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. It was developed by 4A Games in Ukraine and released in March 2010 for Microsoft Windows. Metro 2033 uses the 4A game engine, developed by 4A Games. The 4A Engine supports DirectX-9, 10, and 11, along with NVIDIA PhysX and GeForce 3D Vision.

The 4A engine is multi-threaded in such that only PhysX had a dedicated thread (although PhysX is disabled for this test), and uses a task-model without any pre-conditioning or pre/post-synchronizing, allowing tasks to be done in parallel. The 4A game engine can utilize a deferred shading pipeline, and uses tessellation for greater performance, and also has HDR (complete with blue shift), real-time reflections, color correction, film grain and noise, and the engine also supports multi-core rendering.

Metro 2033 features superior volumetric fog, double PhysX precision, object blur, sub-surface scattering for skin shaders, parallax mapping on all surfaces and greater geometric detail with a less aggressive LODs. Using PhysX, the engine uses many features such as destructible environments, and cloth and water simulations, and particles that can be fully affected by environmental factors.

• Metro 2033
  • DirectX 11, High quality, 4xAA, 4xAF, tessellation, DOF, "Frontline" scene, no PhysX

NVIDIA has been diligently working to promote Metro 2033, and for good reason: it is the most demanding PC video game we've ever tested. When their flagship GeForce GTX 580 struggles to produce 26 FPS at 1920x1200 with DirectX-11 anti-aliasing turned two to its lowest setting, you know that only the strongest graphics processors will generate playable frame rates. All our tests disable advanced PhysX options.

Cost Analysis: Metro 2033 (1920x1200)

Test Summary: There's no doubt that this is a very demanding game. What Crysis was to top-end video cards a few years ago, Metro 2033 is now, with even the strongest single-GPU cards struggling to break 30 frames per second at 1920x1200. And note that this is with PhysX features turned off! No card here could break the 30fps barrier, although the GTX 570 and HD 6950 came very close. None of the other cards produced playable frame rates at that resolution with these settings.

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