Metro Last Light VGA Graphics Benchmark performance test

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Image Quality Modes

The Plot (Wiki)

Last Light takes place one year after the events of Metro 2033, proceeding from the ending where Artyom chose to call down the missile strike on the Dark Ones. The Rangers have since occupied the D6 military facility, with Artyom having become an official member of the group. Khan, the nomad mystic, arrives at D6 to inform Artyom and the Rangers that a single Dark One survived the missile strike. Khan believes the Dark One is the key to humanity's future, and wants to make peace with it, while Ranger leader Colonel Miller wants to kill the creature due its potential threat. Miller sends Artyom to the surface with a mission to kill the Dark One; he is accompanied by Anna, Miller's sarcastic daughter and the Rangers' best sniper.

Artyom succeeds in finding the Dark One, who turns out to be a mere child, but the two of them are captured by soldiers of the Nazi Reich. A good-natured Communist Red Line soldier, Pavel Morozov, helps Artyom escape the Reich, and the two befriend each other after spending considerable time fighting across the Metro tunnels and the wasted surface together. However, when the two reach a Red Line settlement, Pavel is revealed to be a high-ranking officer of the Red Line and allows them to capture Artyom. While escaping captivity, Artyom learns of a plan by the Red Line's head of military intelligence, General Korbut, to capture D6 and take control of the entire Metro. Korbut is assisted by Pavel as well as Lesnitsky, a traitorous Ranger who escaped to the Red Line with samples of a bioweapon stolen from D6. Artyom manages to rescue the Dark One child, with Khan's assistance. After a series of flashbacks where Artyom learns the Dark Ones saved his own life when he was a child, Artyom decides to protect the Dark One. While escorting the Dark One back to Polis, Artyom is confronted by first Lesnitsky and later Pavel. The Dark One uses his powers to read their minds, allowing Artyom to learn of General Korbut's plan to capture D6 and use a bioweapon from the facility to exterminate all human life in the Metro not aligned with the Red Line. After each confrontation, Artyom is given the choice of forgiving his enemy, or taking revenge on them.

The two arrive at Polis, the Metro's central station, where a peace settlement between Hansa, Red Line, and Reich is taking place. The Dark One uses his telepathic abilities to make the Red Line leader Chairman Moskvin publically confess his crimes, including the fact that the peace conference is simply a diversion for General Korbut to attack D6. Artyom, Miller, Khan, and the Rangers make a final stand against Korbut's army, but are ultimately defeated.
 

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Like the original Metro 2033, Last Light has two endings. In the normal/bad ending, Artyom will activate D6's self-destruct device to prevent Korbut from using the facility to wipe out the remnants of humanity, resulting in the deaths of both the Ranger and Red Line armies. Artyom is survived by Anna, who is pregnant with their child. In the alternate/good ending, the Dark One child will arrive along with several other surviving Dark Ones who had been hibernating inside a secret chamber in D6; the Dark Ones defeat Korbut's army, making it unnecessary for Artyom to sacrifice himself and D6. Artyom credits the Dark One child with being humanity's last light of hope.
Development

Visual Image Quality

The PC version of the game will require a DirectX 9, 10 or 11 compatible video card and operating system. The game will support widescreen gaming, including “horizontal plus” widescreen support and multi-monitor gaming with AMD Eyefinity, NVIDIA Surround, and whoop you haven't heard this one in a while .. Matrox TripleHead2Go as well. The game includes four graphics presets, from “Low” to “Very High,” providing a good range of quality-versus-performance options which gives you control over anti-aliasing, texture detail, texture filtering, post-processing, and object level of detail. Some of these options have setting levels that are only available under DX11. 

Metro: Last Light system requirements (minimum)

  • CPU: 2.0 GHz dual core CPU, Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Phenom X2
  • RAM: 1GB of system memory
  • Graphics: DirectX 9 compatible card with 512 MB RAM. Nvidia 200-series or AMD Radeon 3000 series cards.
  • Operating system: Windows XP SP2
  • DirectX compatible audio card
  • 7.5 GB of hard disk space
  • CPU: 2.6 GHz quad core Intel or AMD processor, Intel Core i5, AMD Phenom X4
  • RAM: 2GB
  • Graphics: DirectX 10 or 11 compatible card with 1GB of video memory, Nvidia 400-series or AMD 5000-series.
  • Operating system: Windows 7
  • DirectX compatible audio card
  • 7.5 GB of hard disk space

So on the following two pages I want to show you a couple of in-game screenshots and basically focus on actual in-game quality settings that we use and which you can change.

We always have a peek as well in-between AMD and NVIDIA's quality differences e.g. in-between AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards. Honestly, image quality these days for both companies is near equal. You can zoom in and blow up the still screenshots and detect minor differences if you look with a very professional eye as yes -- both companies do optimize games for better performance. We'll leave that as is as there is much more to see quality wise with the in-game modes. Why should you change or alter internal visual quality modes? Well for one simple reason, performance .. if you have a lower grade graphics card and would like to play in Full HD then changes are pretty slim your graphics card would be fast enough. Throttling down towards a lower image quality mode can significantly boost your performance, at the cost of visual quality though.  

The game basically has several quality modes including : LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH, Very HIGH. 

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Above a quick example, you can see a GeForce GTX Titan at work in a monitor resolution of 2560x1440. With several image quality settings we are able to maintain a constant 40~50 FPS, in Very High quality mode however we advise to leave SSAA disabled in DX11. And this will be the mode we test today.

What you are going to notice is that the game engine itself not at all that demanding, however the SSAA mode is way too taxing taking a huge chunk of performance away. Even 2xSSAA can cost you 40% performance (!) So we'll perform all our tests with the very best image quality settings, yet with SSAA disabled as we need to test mid-range and mainstream cards as well.

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