Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Xtreme 1GB 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 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.

Thanks to recent driver improvements that have targeted Metro 2033, the HD 5850 is about 6 FPS faster than it was a couple of months ago, at 1080p resolution. That pushes it a fair bit past the HD 6850, and likewise, even further ahead of the other similarly-priced options.