GeForce GTX 480 3-way SLI review

Setup your monitor first

Before playing games, setting up your monitor's contrast & brightness levels is a very important thing to do. I realized recently that a lot of you guys have set up your monitor improperly. How do we know this? Because we receive a couple of emails every now and then telling us that a reader can't distinguish between the benchmark charts (colors) in our reviews. We realized, if that happens, your monitor is not properly set up.

This simple test pattern is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 brightness levels, with no profile embedded. If your monitor is correctly set up, you should be able to distinguish each step, and each step should be visually distinct from its neighbors by the same amount. Also, the dark-end step differences should be about the same as the light-end step differences. Finally, the first step should be completely black.

VGA performance: Metro 2033

2033. Horrible Post-Apocalyptic world of 40000 people. They have been living in the metro of a big ex-USSR city – Moscow, for 20 terrible years. Nuclear war destroyed their homeland. These people are the last representatives of mankind - the human cycle of evolution nears its end, new species (very ugly) appear on the surface of the Earth and deep inside the metro. Some people inside the metro still remember the happy years before THAT DAY and they still believe that one day they will return to the surface. What’s present is a very heavy psychological atmosphere: small children who will never see sky, old people who still remember the PAST times, and young men and women who fight for their world, for their children. Each station became a country, with its government, army, borders and many other things from the past. Firearms cartridges serve as currency. This small dying world is a precise copy of the past big world. Do these humans have a future, or are they doomed to extinction? Maybe answers can be found on the surface, or in deep secret military underground laboratories. Who knows?

Metro 2033 supports a number of advanced DX11 features with the latest generation of DX11 graphics cards. DX11 cards will experience advanced Depth of Field effects as well as Full Tessellation on character models," revealed THQ. Now we measure in DX11 mode only, it's a choice we made. Above some performance numbers based on the different image quality settings. The card has a rough time, but that goes for any graphics card really.

In the end you guys will likely select a lower (NORMAL or just HIGH) image quality mode in the game. Moving forward, we'll be using this title as a DirectX 11 benchmark, meaning that previous generation (DX9/10) graphics cards will not be tested with this particular title.

Now here's a perfect example of why we setup Metro so stringent image quality wise as we did, me made it EXTREMELY GPU dependant, as a result, well just look at that phenomenal scaling.

What you'll see in most benchmarks today is ridiculous CPU bottlenecks in 3-way SLI. Well, that's certainly not the case here.