- Date:
- Wednesday, May 29, 2013
- Author:
- Grady McKinney
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
- Share:

Metro: Last Light Video Card Performance and IQ Review
Today we look at 4A Games Metro: Last Light. Running the 4A Engine it supports modern DX11 effects including tessellation, and NVIDIA PhysX, providing realistic simulations of particles, water, cloth and fog. We'll evaluate this game using today's latest video cards including GTX TITAN and GTX 780, for a total of eight video cards.
SSAA and PhysX Performance Comparisons
In these tests we will be comparing the performances of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 and AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition with each level of SSAA enabled at 1080p, to describe the approximate performance impact that results from using it. We will also look at the performance of PhysX on the GeForce GTX 680.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 SSAA Performance
Metro: Last Light's SSAA has a large performance impact because it is rendering all elements of the screen at a higher resolution, then resizes them to the monitors resolution. For instance, we are playing at 1920x1080. When enabling 2X SSAA, the image is being rendered at 2688x1512 and then resized to 1080p and displayed as crisper, clearer, and with reduced aliasing.
First we will be looking at Metro: Last Light's .5X SSAA option. While 2X SSAA renders the image at a higher resolution, .5X SSAA actually renders the image at half the resolution, and then resizes it. The image quality drops significantly when doing this, but there is a large gain in performance. At 1920x1080 with no SSAA enabled the GeForce GTX 680 averaged 69.5 FPS. Quality settings and tessellation were both set to "very high." Enabling .5X SSAA brought the GeForce GTX 680 up to 106.5 FPS. This is 53.2% faster than with no SSAA enabled.
The level of SSAA that improves image quality, but decreases the performance is available at 2X, 3X, and 4X. With 2X SSAA enabled we see the GeForce GTX 680's performance drops to 39.2 FPS. This is 43.6% slower than when running without SSAA. Enabling 3X SSAA brought an average of 27.2 FPS, which is 60.9% slower than no SSAA. With 4X SSAA the framerate drops to 20.5 FPS. The GeForce GTX 680 is down 70.5% in performance compared to playing with no SSAA enabled.
AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition SSAA Performance
With the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition installed on our test system, it averaged 63.9 FPS in Metro: Last Light with SSAA disabled. The video card operates 36.9% faster at 87.5 FPS after enabling .5X SSAA. Again, this performance gain comes at the tremendous cost of decreased image quality.
The AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition handled SSAA in Metro: Last Light slightly better than the GeForce GTX 680, but still too demanding to provide an enjoyable gameplay experience. With 2X SSAA enabled it averaged 39.7 FPS. That is 37.9% slower than playing without SSAA. Using 3X SSAA we average 29.3 FPS, which is 54.1% slower than no SSAA. 4X SSAA brings the framerate down to 22.8 FPS. This is 64.3% slower than if we had no SSAA enabled.
PhysX Performance
To test PhysX we are running Metro: Last Light at 1920x1080 with no SSAA enabled. Tessellation and quality settings are both set to "very high." With PhysX disabled the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 averaged 69.5 FPS. After enabling PhysX, the GeForce GTX 680's performance drops to 56.9 FPS. This is 18.1% slower than with PhysX disabled. Still at a 18.1% performance drop, it requires less than half the performance that it takes to enable 2X SSAA at 1080p.
We recommend that you average at least 45 FPS if you are trying to play with PhysX enabled. Dropping below this, you will physically feel sporadic lag anytime you see things benefiting from PhysX. The AMD video cards performance drops too severely with PhysX enabled, as it is designed specifically for NVIDIA's GPUs.





