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The makers of Metro 2033 – 4A Games was founded by people who split off from GSC Game World a year before the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, in particular Oles’ Shiskovtsov and Aleksandr Maksimchuk, the programmers who worked on the development of X-Ray engine used in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. The game utilizes multi-platform 4A Engine, running on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Microsoft Windows. There is some contention regarding whether the engine is based on the pre-release X-Ray engine (as claimed by Sergiy Grygorovych, the founder of GSC Game World, as well as users who have seen the 4A Engine SDK screenshots, citing visual similarities, shared resources, and technical evaluation of the pre-release 4A Engine demo conducted at the request of GSC Game World), or whether the engine is an original development (as claimed by 4A Games and Oles’ Shiskovtsov in particular, who claims it would have been impractical to retrofit the X-ray engine with console support). 4A Engine features Nvidia PhysX support, enhanced AI, and a console SDK for Xbox 360. The PC version includes exclusive features such as DirectX 11 support and has been described as “a love letter to PC gamers” because of the developers’ choice to “make the PC version [especially] phenomenal”.
We tested Metro 2033 at the native 1080p resolution of our Panasonic 600hz Plasma Television. DX11, 16af with AAA. We benchmarked with in-game ‘very high’ settings as well as ‘medium’.
Running Metro at very high settings proves to be too much of an ordeal for the hardware on test today, with even the HD5850 struggling to maintain playable frame rates. We lowered the settings to normal within the in game panels and rerun the tests.
Lowering the settings really helps to increase the frame rates and although we would probably lower the resolution a little to further improve the results the HD5850 and GTX465 are mostly playable. The eVGA overclocked card puts in a very similar result to the reference GTX465 with a little bit more ‘hitching' in places. Again we would imagine that the forthcoming 1GB GTX460 is going to improve the Metro 2033 experience.
performance is very good indeed.
Third time lucky, good card, seems to be almost worth the wait
Nice overclocked performance. Seems a reference card would be a good buy and then manually overclocking it to save some money,.
That evga board is really good value for money, under 200? the 5830 I never liked, and I can see why now.
Very good card from nvidia, power consumption is also impressive considering the performance.
I am quite surprised how good this card is, seems to be the top buy now under £200.
It is a tough call to make, spend a bit extra on evga superclocked to get moer performance for sure out of the box, or save some money, get the reference card and hope it overclocks as good. They all seem to overclock well, but you never know by how much until you take it home and trash it.
I think nvidia shares should go up with this one.
Ohhh, I like this card and I never thought id say that about fermi. which to this point has been a power sucking waste of space.
Yeah I agree the power consumption and noise levels are class leading. well done.
Well color me impressed with this one. Wasnt expecting such good performance and temperatures.
Its still not as good as the AMD 5850.
well of course its not as good as the HD5850, that card competes against the GTX465. its about £50 more?
Big release for nvidia, probably their biggest card release for sales in 4 years. It might save their sales in 2010. I know they are struggling.
performance figures are good, read a few reviews and it seems to be sending the HD5830 home in a coffin. its about time we see nvidia competitive again, even if its a mid range sector. the big sales are here and in the 100-150 sector.
thanks for including the HQV Benchmark 2.0 results.
Interesting results, and its good to see nvidia working on their drivers for IQ now in HQV Benchmark 2.0
fermi for the masses methinks. its a very solid product all round. Cant get over how small it is, but it still needs 2 x6 pin connectors.
Figures are good, noise is great, power drain is excellent. size is tiny. Not much to knock, even the price seems competitive.
wow, nvidia leading a price point, hell just froze over !
I like this card a lot. Might pick one up later in the month.
Have one on preorder.
Nice comeback. I’m waiting to see how AMD will respond, and find it hard to speculate on that. AMD can probably lower prices considerably if it wants, but on the other hand if Southern Islands are indeed expected in a couple of months’ time, perhaps it would just wait for that.