Next, we turned up the graphics workload a notch or two, with Metro 2033, a 3D graphics stress test if we ever saw one.
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| Metro 2033 |
| DirectX Gaming Performance |
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Metro 2033
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Metro 2033 is your basic post-apocalyptic first person shooter game with a few rather unconventional twists. Unlike most FPS titles, there is no health meter to measure your level of ailment, but rather you’re left to deal with life, or lack there-of more akin to the real world with blood spatter on your visor and your heart rate and respiration level as indicators. The game is loosely based on a novel by Russian Author Dmitry Glukhovsky. Metro 2003 boasts some of the best 3D visuals on the PC platform currently including a DX11 rendering mode that makes use of advanced depth of field effects and character model tessellation for increased realism. Since Intel's HD Graphics 3000 core only supports up to DX10.1 rendering, we tested the game resolutions of 1280X720 and 1024X768 without anti-aliasing enabled and in-game image quality options set to normal quality in the game's DX10 rendering mode with16X Anisotropic Filtering enabled. DX11 rendering modes were added just for reference.
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Here the playing field is a bit more condensed, largely in part due to the game's demanding physics engine. Here the AMD A8-3500M shows an approximate 25% lead over Intel's higher-end quad-core Core i7 chip, but falls about the same diffential short of a similarly equipped dual-core Core i5 processor with a discrete NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M GPU at the helm for the graphics workload.
