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.

Hands On With NVIDIA's Shadowplay & The Test Company of Heroes 2
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  • IUU - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link

    So, the high end of video cards can run shamelessly all the "high" end titles at 2560x1440. What are the game developers doing? So much computing power being wasted for viewing our games at nonsensical resolutions? There's still room for improvement of the game visuals, why don't they take advantage of the cards' muscle?
    I may be eccentric, but for some peculiar reason, I don't get excited by playing pacman and supermario at ultra hd.
  • Vortac - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link

    Folding@home double precision benchmark results are somewhat strange to me. How can a 780 Ti card (with FP64=1/24 FP32) beat a 7970 aka 280X (with FP64=1/4 FP32)?
  • abhishek_takin - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link

    780ti is great card in terms of performance. But 700$ is too much to ask. As a gamer Max FPS is not everything. It should smooth and fast with Ultra / High details. I have 7970GHZ crossfire with 27 inch Dell dual monitor setup. My pc smokes all the latest game in the market. And ask me how much i paid 640$ and bunch of free games. I know the problem of crossfire but its not that huge for which one should opt for a single card for 700$.

    I am not a fanboy of Nvidia or AMD. If the card's price would be under 550$ then everyone would be saying that.... its the best card ever made. Only because of its big price tag lots of people are voting for 290X, 290 and 780(normal) which is very much fair.
  • nsiboro - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link

    780ti burnt
    http://www.chiphell.com/thread-897838-2-2.html

    NV issue stop sale
    http://www.chiphell.com/thread-897383-11-1.html

    What's happening?

    Can someone confirm this?
  • polaco - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link

    who on earth will be able to confirm a post on a page written in chineese?
  • nsiboro - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link

    Yer right.
    How about in English.

    http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/74131-chiphell...
  • nsiboro - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link

    Could be a hoax. The posted image of the burnt PCI-E connector doesn't look like a 780ti.
  • nsiboro - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link

    It's confirmed to affect Galaxy branded GTX-780ti.

    http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&...

    UPDATE: It is reported GALAXY official has released a formal announcement, said 2013 sales between 11.7-11.10 GTX 780 Ti existence of quality defects, serial number 13B0020705-13B0020759 a total of 55 cards between the user can call the official customer service phone 400-700 -3933 for a free replacement.
  • Skr13 - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link

    Please fix typo at the Company of Heroes 2 page: http://postimg.org/image/u96hy7skf/62e3b91a/
  • DPOverLord - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link

    What about on Surround monitors, the main draw for the Titan was that it has 6GB of Ram.

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