GIGABYTE Radeon HD 7790 1GB & NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST 2GB Review

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.

We saw it first with Battlefield 3, and we see it again with Metro 2033. AMD’s card simply seems to suffer with a mere 1GB of memory – although the more limited 128-bit no doubt has something to do with it as well. NVIDIA’s card dominates here, especially with a game that AMD’s typically performed very well in.

Sleeping Dogs

Many have called Sleeping Dogs the “Asian Grand Theft Auto“, but the game does a lot different that helps it stand out of the crowd. In lieu of supplying the player with a gazilion guns, Sleeping Dogs focuses heavily on hand-to-hand combat. There are also many collectibles that can be found to help upgrade your character and unlock special fighting abilities – and if you happen to enjoy an Asian atmosphere, this is one tree you’ll want to bark up.

Manual Run-through: Our run here takes place during the chapter “Amanda”, on a dark, dank night. Our saved game begins us at the first apartment in the game (in North Point), though that’s not where we begin capturing our framerate. Instead, we walk outside and request our motorcycle from the garage. Once set, we begin recording framerates and drive along a specific path all the way to Aberdeen, which takes about two minutes.

While Sleeping Dogs is a graphically-gorgeous game, it doesn’t seem to push the GPU memory quite as much as some of the other games we’ve taken a look at so far. This is a game that NVIDIA has all-but ignored while AMD has pushed incredibly hard. If not for the likely AMD optimizations that this game has, we might have seen an even tighter gap here, based on what we’ve seen up to this point.