GeForce GTX 470 & 480 review - VGA performance: Metro 2033: The Last Refuge (DX11)

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.

As you can see, the NVIDIA GTX 400 series kicks ass. Mind you that we test at very HIGH image quality settings with the AAA mode in DX11. You guys would play in normal mode really. We selected the most stringent settings as we want to use this title for a long time to come. So long story short, the GTX 470 would easily achieve higher frame rates if you take image quality down one notch.

 Metro is a title that suits the GTX 480 really well, leading performance for the GTX 480 alright. That difference is rather incredible really.

As stated -- we'll be using Metro 2033 for future tests and benchmarks of DirectX 11 titles. You guys will likely select a lower (NORMAL or just HIGH) image quality mode in the game. Above, an example of how you can play with different Image Quality modes and the frame rates that accomplishes. We keep DX11 flicked on and this is the GTX 480.

For reference, 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.