Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 OC WindForce review

DX11: Metro 2033 - The Last Refuge

Metro 2033 is about a 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. Users with DX11 cards will experience advanced Depth of Field effects as well as Full Tessellation on character models, according to THQ.

Now we measure things in DX11 mode only, it's a choice we made. Above are some performance numbers based on the different image quality settings. The card has a rough time, but that goes for any graphics card really. Image quality settings are maxed out, we are in DX11 mode and have AAA anti-aliasing activated which is roughly the software equivalent of 4xMSAA.

You guys will most likely select a lower (NORMAL or just HIGH) image quality mode in the game, which is perfectly playable.

A year ago we opted for these stringent settings so that we can use this software for a long time with future hardware as well. Moving forward, we'll be using this title as a DirectX 11 benchmark, meaning that previous generation (DX9/10) graphics cards will not (can not) be tested with this particular DX11 code path. Above, a comparison of multiple cards running the game at 1920x1200, maxed out.

Again the Radeon HD 7970 shows its muscle. That is an impressive framerate at those settings.