Metro: Last Light

As always, kicking off our look at performance is 4A Games’ latest entry in their Metro series of subterranean shooters, Metro: Last Light. The original Metro: 2033 was a graphically punishing game for its time and Metro: Last Light is in its own right too. On the other hand it scales well with resolution and quality settings, so it’s still playable on lower end hardware.

For the bulk of our analysis we’re going to be focusing on our 2560x1440 results, as monitors at this resolution will be what we expect a single GTX 780 Ti to be primarily used with. A single card does have the necessary horsepower to drive a 4K monitor on its own, but only at lower quality settings. Even as powerful as GTX 780 Ti is, a pair of them will be needed to get good framerates out of most games if using 4K at high quality settings.

Looking at our Metro: Last Light results then, it’s the start of what’s going to be a fairly consistent streak for the GTX 780 Ti. Though it doesn’t improve on GTX Titan or GTX 780’s gaming performance by leaps and bounds, the additional SMX and increased clockspeeds means that it has little trouble pulling away from those cards and from AMD’s 290 series. As a result the GTX 780 Ti beats the GTX Titan by 11%, GTX 780 by 19%, and though it’s closer than normal, the lead over the 290X stands at 6%.

To that end in Metro it leads the pack of single-GPU cards, though it does come up just short of being able to average 60 frames per second at 2560. Anything over 60fps will require multiple GPUs; and even then GTX 780 Ti is fast enough that sometimes even a pair of GPUs (GTX 770 SLI) isn’t going to be appreciably faster.

Meanwhile looking at GTX 780 Ti SLI performance, the SLI setup tops the charts at 2560 for everything short of the 290X in uber mode, though in this case (like most cases) two high-end GPUs is on the verge of being overkill even at 2560. Otherwise looking at 4K, NVIDIA’s poor 4K scaling on Metro once again makes itself present here, with NVIDIA’s performance only minimally benefitting from the second card. In the case of Metro at 4K, the 290X CF is going to be by far the faster option.

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  • bigboxes - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    "Doesn't bode well." Just zip it.
  • TheJian - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1JOhT015ww
    Fast forward to 8:35 or so...Got smashed, both OC'ed to the max. In Uber as anandtech even showed, it hits it's max all day. So 1ghz won't get more, and they run higher than that at linustechtips (both cards oced max they could get). Nowhere close in any benchmark they run. Don't forget you can clock the crap out of 780TI as already shown everywhere. If you're assuming a "Properly Cooled" ghz edition beats 780ti well we've only seen REF 780TI's so far too right? So what does a "Properly Cooled" 780ti do? They hit 1200-1300 stock fan. Will they hit 1300-1400 with an aftermarket fan? You won't catch it as it is without water and you'll need to be way over 1ghz to do it and pulling more watts no doubt.

    What record are you giving? Assumptions and guesswork that goes against all current info from MANY sites. Check out all the sites I listed. That is what we call "for the record".
    http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_...
    Only 1120/1175 (base/boost) and it's 30.8% faster than UBER 290x. Not even sure water would catch this and this is a WEAK OC compared to other sites like overclockers hitting 1291/1304. They can do this out of the box.
  • whiteswolf - Sunday, June 8, 2014 - link

    to let you know the nvidea gtx 780 ti is walking and not breaking sweat. while the amdsare running think of it this way. if you over clock or make nvidea gtx 780 ti sprint it is said int can get a 19% to 20% boost in performence. and it only gets noise and sound of amds card.
  • Da W - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    The only thing louder than a 290X is a Nvidia Fanboy.
  • HisDivineOrder - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    Actually, I think the louder thing still is the sound of AMD fanboys coming into a review of a new nVidia halo product and crying about "nvidia fanboys." ;)
  • OverclockedCeleron - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    Well, ask your colleague troll not to bring AMD trash talk into an Nvidia article. (See first comment to this article).
  • bigboxes - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    Haha!
  • Flunk - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    Sure, if you like to throw money away. Nvidia could seriously destroy AMD on this generation, but they're choosing not to compete by not pricing in line with performance.

    I personally think AMD has the edge when it comes to cost/unit because their chip is smaller, which is how they can price so much lower.
  • 1Angelreloaded - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    See its about the feature sets as well that determine price, and of course support. The 289x should have been released with the 600 series not the end of the 700 series and at the edge of starting the 800 series in a few months with Maxwell.
  • 1Angelreloaded - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    edit "290x"

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