Date:
Monday , April 05, 2010
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Metro 2033 DirectX 11 Gameplay Performance and IQ

Metro 2033 is proving to be a graphically demanding DX11 game. It offers a unique array of graphical features including Tessellation. We compare the GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470 to the Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850. We also have detailed apples-to-apples testing and image quality screenshots.

The Video Cards

For this gameplay evaluation, we will be looking at Metro 2033 using four video cards. From AMD, we will be using the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and the Radeon HD 5850. And of course, from NVIDIA, we have the new Fermi-based video cards, the GeForce GTX 480 and the GeForce GTX 470.

Introduction

Metro 2033 was released to North America on March 16, 2010 by 4A Games and THQ. The game is based on a novel of the same name by the Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. The game, as well as the author's collaboration, was first announced in early 2009. On Metacritic, the PC version of Metro 2033 has earned a professional reviewer score of 81 and an aggregate user rating of 8.3.

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Metro 2033

Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter survival horror game. It is set in Moscow after nuclear war has ravaged the surface. Most of the game is set in the metro system, which is a network of underground train tunnels. Obviously, the timeframe is the year 2033, and entire generations of citizens have grown up in the tunnels beneath Moscow. Metro 2033 eschews the traditional health meter; replace it with a regenerating health system indicated by visible blood splatters on the screen and an audible heart rate. Also important is the gas mask, which is required when the player leaves the tunnels and travels to the surface. The outside air is toxic, and the gas masks degrade and become damaged.

The Engine

4A Games used their own 4A Engine to power Metro 2033. Early reports from the internet rumor mills indicated that the 4A Engine was a derivative of GSC Game World’s X-Ray engine, which powers the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of games. This rumor was apparently supported by the fact that 4A Games was founded by former GSC employees. However, those rumors have been rejected by 4A Games .

The 4A Engine is a multiplatform engine supporting Microsoft Windows, the Microsoft Xbox 360, and the Sony PlayStation 3. On Windows, it supports DirectX 9, 10, and 11. It also supports NVIDIA’s PhysX and 3D Vision technologies. In an interview with Eurogamer, 4A Games’ CTO Oles Shishkovtsov described their new proprietary game engine.

"I really enjoy three things: compute shaders, tessellation shaders and draw/create contexts separation," Shishkovtsov says. "The major thing that can up the performance is the compute shaders. Today, games spend the majority of the frame doing the various kinds of post-processing. The easy route to extract some performance is to rewrite that post-processing via compute. "Even the simple blurs can be almost twice as fast. For example we've rewritten our depth-of-field code, to greatly enhance quality while still maintaining playable frame-rate. [In Metro 2033] all the 'organic' things like humans are tessellated and monsters use real displacement mapping, to greatly enhance visuals."

"The player spends more than half of the game under the ground. That means deep dark tunnels and poorly-lit rooms. There are no electricity sources apart from the generators. From the engine perspective - to make it visually interesting, convincing and thrilling - we needed a huge amount of rather small local light sources. Deferred lighting is the perfect choice."

There is a lot more to the interview, and anyone truly interested in learning more about the engine is encouraged to read it. For our purposes, what we need to know is that it supports DX11, DX10, and DX9 and it uses tessellation on human characters. The engine also utilizes deferred lighting, so traditional means of enabling AA will probably not be functional.

Also, Metro 2033 is a "The Way It’s Meant To Be Played" title, as if the PhysX support did not give that away. We will not be diving into PhysX in this evaluation; we will save that for a possible future update to see what that brings to the game.