Digital Storm ODE Level 4 System Review

by Paul Lilly — Monday, May 07, 2012, 10:15 AM EDT

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Gaming: Metro 2033, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and Batman Arkham City

Metro 2033

DX11 Gaming Performance

Metro 2033

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.

This is another great example of the point of diminishing returns we talked about earlier. When we tested Maingear's $7,570 system, it pulled 60.67fps in Metro 2033 at 2560x1600 with the settings maxed out. For less than half the price, Digital Storm's ODE Level 4 managed 54.33fps. You can certainly configure a higher end system, through Digital Storm or elsewhere on the Web, but in this case we're talking about a 6fps difference.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Call of Pripyat

DX11 Gaming Performance

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Call of Pripyat is the third game in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series and throws in DX11 to the mix. This benchmark is based on one of the locations found within the latest game. Testing includes four stages and utilizes various weather conditions, as well as different time of day settings. It offers a number of presets and options, including multiple versions of DirectX, resolutions, antialiasing, etc. SunShafts represents the most graphically challenging stage available. We conducted our testing with DX11 enabled, multiple resolutions, and Ultra settings.

Even at $3,479, the ODE Level 4 might be out of your price range. But if you can swing it, this is the type of performance gain you can expect over less expensive gaming systems.

Batman: Arkham City

DirectX Gaming Performance

Batman: Arkham City

Batman: Arkham City is a sequel to 2009’s Game of the Year winning Batman: Arkham Asylum. This recently released sequel, however, lives up to and even surpasses the original. The story takes place 18 months after the original game. Quincy Sharp, the onetime administrator of Arkham Asylum, has become mayor and convinced Gotham to create "Arkham City" by walling off the worst, most crime-ridden areas of the city and turning the area into a giant open-air prison. The game has DirectX 9 and 11 rendering paths, with support for tessellation, multi-view soft shadows, and ambient occlusion. We tested in DX11 mode with all in-game graphical options set to their maximum values, at various resolutions.

One of the few games that seems to hold a grudge against systems with multiple AMD graphics cards in a Crossfire configuration is Batman: Arkham City. Performance just doesn't scale the way it should, or really much at all. There have been updated drivers since we last ran this benchmark in a prior review, but they didn't make a difference. Nevertheless, there's still enough under the hood here to run the game at a high resolution with all the settings turned up and still get better-than-playable framerates.