Next we turn up the heat a little bit with Metro 2033, which is known to be a
GPU-crusher 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 DX9 rendering mode with16X Anisotropic Filtering
enabled.
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Apparently NVIDIA isn't paying much attention to DX9 rendering modes these days (at least if you consider this test and our previous FarCry 2 test), because here Intel's Sandy Bridge IGP is almost able to catch the discrete GPU and again shows about 2X the performance of the previous generation Core i5 series chip. Sure DX11 is where it's at with this game engine but with these mainstream mobile configurations tested here, things would slow to a slide show crawl and Intel's HD Graphics 3000 engine is only DX10.1 compatible.
