NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580

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 though it supports DirectX 11, it’s almost a feature worth ignoring, because the extent you’ll need to go to in order to see playable framerates isn’t likely going to be worth it.

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.

Metro 2033 is so AMD-bound, it’s almost a little insulting. At the same time, it’s also insulting that DirectX 11 mode is still unplayable at decent settings with even the GTX 580. At the settings above though, NVIDIA’s latest broke through the 40 FPS mark which is key.

40 FPS is about the limit as far as “best playable” goes, and the GTX 580 hit that fine. Metro 2033 is a strange first-person shooter where 40 FPS almost feels like 60 FPS, so 40 FPS here is very much playable – especially in order to retain the higher detail settings.