Metro 2033

The next game on our list is 4A Games’ Metro 2033, their tunnel shooter released last year. In September the game finally received a major patch resolving some outstanding image quality issues with the game, finally making it suitable for use in our benchmark suite. At the same time a dedicated benchmark mode was added to the game, giving us the ability to reliably benchmark much more stressful situations than we could with FRAPS. If Crysis is a tropical GPU killer, then Metro would be its underground counterpart.

The GTX 550 ends up doing what the GTS 450 could not on Metro, and that’s cracking 30fps at 1680x1050. Realistically speaking however Metro is quite possibly the only thing more resource intensive than Crysis, and even though we’re down to “high” settings without anti-aliasing, this isn’t very playable. You’d have to go down in quality/resolution further still to get this FPS fluid.

Compared to other cards Metro normally gives AMD a slight edge. This results in the worst showing for the GTX 550 out of our benchmarks, with the 5770 of all things topping it by 5%. Compared to the 6850 the deficit is reduced however, with the GTX 550 coming in at 77% the performance. Performance relative to NVIDIA cards is rather consistent with BattleForge: 17% ahead of the GTS 450, but 18% behind the GTX 460 768MB.

Zotac’s overclock does manage to turn the tables some. The AMP still trails the 6850 and GTX 460, but at least it’s finally faster than the 5770.

BattleForge HAWX
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  • dmans - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link

    my 8800 gt is better than this thing.
  • mapesdhs - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link


    Google for, "Ian PC tests", it's the 1st link that comes back. Scroll down the page
    for the full list of results pages (I've done a whlole bunch). Voila, a mountain of
    8800GT data for you to chew on. 8-) And much more to add!

    Ian.
  • HangFire - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link

    "lan PC tests". Hmm. I get a reviews.cnet.com link for a WiFi antenna.

    And, can you please stop spamming the comments?
  • mapesdhs - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link


    I'm not spamming the comments, I'm providing real info to help people
    out. Re the Google, it could be because being in the UK I'm forced
    to use google.co.uk which may give different results to google.com
    (probably does). Alas, nothing I can do about that (hmm, "try, "Ian SGI
    UK" instead, that should bring up the right link). If you want to know
    what I'm talking about though, send me a PM and I'll send you the refs
    so you can see what I mean. People keep asking upgrade questions
    which review articles do not or cannot answer, eg. those playing
    older games, at lesser resolutions, with systems that don't have uber
    CPUs, etc.. I've been working to provide the info that answers such
    questions (have you?). That isn't spamming.

    Ian.
  • HangFire - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link

    >my 8800 gt is better than this thing.

    That would make it faster than the GTX260 as well. That's some 8800GT!

    I love the value that my 8800GT provided, but it is sitting on the shelf now for a reason.
  • sheh - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link

    I'm not one to comment on this sort of things in general but I must in this case. Each instance of "in to" in the graphics hardware articles comes with a mental dissonance I have to resolve before reading can be resumed.

    http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/into.html
    http://data.grammarbook.com/blog/definitions/into-...

    Other than that, keep up the good work. :)
  • gammaray - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link

    I don't understand the logic behind the pricing of video cards nowadays.

    Low end video cards like this new 550ti should be below 100$
    mid range video cards 150ish and
    high end 200-250$ MAXIMUM
  • mapesdhs - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link


    An item is only ever worth what someone is willing to pay.

    There are those with big budgets who are happy to pay $600+, hence products
    to match such affordability exist and always will do.

    If you had something to sell, would you let someone buy it for $200 if you had
    a different customer who was happy to pay you $400? ;)

    Such is the law of supply & demand. I deal with this every day with respect to
    buying/selling used SGI items. Hobbyists assume old items should be cheap
    because they're old and they don't want to pay much, but in reality commercial
    demand for certain items extremely strong, so the real value is sometimes very
    high. Same basic concept applies to anything really. A brand of chocolate
    cookies my gf & I particularly like have gone up in price recently by quite a lot,
    and I'm sure it's because they are popular. Demand rise = price rise.

    In some parts of the world, the market for high-end consumers GPUs is quite strong.

    Ian.
  • Will Robinson - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link

    What a shame to soil the good reputation of past and present Ti cards on this dud.
  • Belard - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link

    "TI" is meaningless. Might as well mean "Total Idiot".

    If they took out the "TI", it would still be the same product. Its all marketing to get people to remember about the old $200 kick-ass 4200~4600 cards... before the GF 5800 debacle.

    TI originally was about its manufacturing (so they say), but look back. There were no 4200 and 4200 TI, right? They divide the GF2-tech cards into 4x0MX and the state of the art into 4x00TI.

    We'll soon see the return of MX, PRO and Ultras I think... hell, maybe even the "Geforce GTX ti 785 Ultra TNT" in 2012.

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