by Rob Williams on December 17, 2012 in Graphics & Displays
NVIDIA does such a great job filling holes in its product line-ups, that sometimes it manages to fill a void we didn’t even know existed. The GTX 650 Ti is a perfect example of this. This GK106-based card sits close to the GTX 660, and with GIGABYTE’s overclocked GV-N65TOC-1GI, we’ll see if we can close the gap even further.
One of the more popular Internet memes for the past couple of years has been, “Can it run Crysis?”, but as soon as Metro 2033 launched, that’s a meme that should have died. Metro 2033 is without question one of the beefiest games on the market, and only just recently have GPUs been released that can allow the game to run in its DX11 mode at modest resolutions.
Manual Run-through: The level we use for testing is part of chapter 4, called “Child”, where we must follow a linear path through multiple corridors until we reach our end point, which takes a total of about 90 seconds. Please note that due to the reason mentioned above, we test this game in DX10 mode, as DX11 simply isn’t that realistic from a performance standpoint.
There are few games on the planet that can make Battlefield 3‘s requirements seem modest, but Metro 2033 heads up the club. The game came out two years ago and still manages to punish current systems when the DirectX 11 mode is used. With our lowly 650 Ti, the game was simply unplayable. To make it so, we had to drop down to DirectX 10 mode, which boosted us to 54 FPS on average. Thankfully, we were able to retain the “High” detail setting.