Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 FleX 1GB

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 somewhat of a disappointing title for mid-range cards, because both DX10 and DX11 models are almost an impossibility at a decent resolution. Fortunately for gamers, DX9 mode still happens to look fantastic, but as one of the few games out there built in with DX11 mode, it would be nice to actually play it at those settings. As far as our chosen detail settings above go, the HD 5770 is limited to 1680×1050.

Given just how hardcore of a game Metro 2033 is on a GPU, I’m personally surprised that one such as the HD 5770 can handle 1920×1080 at decent detail settings, but sure enough… Medium detail and DX10 and 50 FPS on average. Not a bad deal.

Metro 2033 @ 4800×900: Medium Detail, DX9, 0xAA	Min: 25 / Avg: 37.464 FPS

Because Metro 2033 doesn’t allow fine-tuning the detail settings to any real degree, we were limited in how much we could tweak to get a playable setting. Our only option here was to drop things down to DX9 mode, while retaining Medium detail levels. As mentioned above, though, this game still looks great in DX9 mode, as the screenshot above can attest.