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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 set up various resolutions and configurations in DX11 mode to find out what was playable … as this engine is extremely demanding.
At 4800×900 with AAA enabled, 4x AF on and settings on HIGH we managed to get the game playable at 4800×900 with two XFX BE HD5970's in CFx. In single card mode the game was juddery in many of the sections and we wouldn't class this as playable. The single reference HD5970 was utterly unplayable at these settings dropping into single digits in a few of the test environments.
good god. that is hilarious. Crysis playable at 5760×1080 at enthusiast :p
lol. Not much more to say to this review. those frame rates are the highest ive seen ever.
Crysis is impressive. it still runs like shit for me at 1920 🙂
Well tickle my tonsels. thats a credit card bill and a half for that system. how much, 5k for the rig ?
The ducati analogy is interesting. I laughed initially but you have a point and I get where you are coming from.
Sorry at the end of the day however, I couldn’t even begin to contemplate spending almost 2k on a Crossfire setup.
CPU £700, PSU £250, Memory £150, Graphics £1800, Case £250, Hard Drive £300. Cooler £100.
Lovely. liked the videos too, that memory is wicked, is that crucial ballistix tracer ?
Its £100 less than the ARES, so at least thats something.
Great cards and they look beautiful, much nicer than ARES imo. Isnt AMD’s new range coming out in a few months? surely makes these pretty much redundant now.
Gaming on these for a month would give a nice electricity bill. AX850 was getting warm? thats a serious output level.
How many of these are XFX making? 500 ?
The cost is so high probably to cover, or help cover the R&D by XFX. I can’t see them selling too many of these, id love to get sales figures, out of curiousity.
i love these cards, but I couldn’t afford anything close to this. I saw a great review of this on hardware heaven too a few weeks ago.
@ Robert – yeah it would heat up the house, so you might save money long term. not sure of the overall output, I just measured the cards.
@ Brad – yes , ballistix tracer – great memory and very underrated, ive had those to 2ghz.
@ Sam – I dont think any of us would spend 1800 on a system like this, well Id love to, but im just like you guys, a pauper 😉
@ Joe – I haven’t read it, but I am sure it is good, Stuart is one of the best reviewers on the net.
@ Melted Cheese Tech – I honestly have no idea of the amount of cards produced in this range, I wouldn’t say very many. ill find out if I can.
@ Trevor – I don’t think your scenario just relates to Graphics cards, but yes a new range of cards, not long away.
Ok I just called XFX, they only made 1000 of these, worldwide. quite a limited run.
Very nice, apart from the noise ratings. crazy performance.
… hmmm…
If I win euro millions, I might consider setup like this… 😀
the toys of the rich and famous. if only 🙂
Those are really sexy looking cards – love the colours. they seem rather loud, but its part of the trade off for ultimate performance.
very nice, wouldnt make me much of a better gamer however, I suck 🙂
I have been saving up for one of these since it was announced, almost have the money now, but it will probably all be gone by the time I get it together 🙁
Very nice performance to say the least. It seems totally overkill for what most people need, but hell if you have three monitors and a core i7 970 or 980x, SSD, 1200W psu, why the hell not ? 🙂
On the benchmark reviews on haven the person says that a nvidia 460 overclocked gets 30 fps average? i scored 68 fps with sli’ed 260 1 year old videocards. DX11 in this benchmark test is backwards compatible so that is with a dx 11 render… So I question the validity of that statement — “For comparison, an overclocked GTX460 scores an average of 37.1 fps. Scaling in Crossfire X is very good with the average frame rate jumping from 62.6 to 114.3 when another card is added. On a side note, we expect to see Tesselation improving with the new range of ATI cards.”
With that said, my minimum fps was 10 fps higher then the minimum fps logged on those bench tests. So your buying overhead fps ;(.