Zotac GTX 465 Review: Full-on, affordable Fermi?

The makers of Metro 2033 – 4A Games was founded by people who split off from GSC Game World a year before the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, in particular Oles' Shiskovtsov and Aleksandr Maksimchuk, the programmers who worked on the development of X-Ray engine used in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. The game utilizes multi-platform 4A Engine, running on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Microsoft Windows. There is some contention regarding whether the engine is based on the pre-release X-Ray engine (as claimed by Sergiy Grygorovych, the founder of GSC Game World, as well as users who have seen the 4A Engine SDK screenshots, citing visual similarities, shared resources, and technical evaluation of the pre-release 4A Engine demo conducted at the request of GSC Game World), or whether the engine is an original development (as claimed by 4A Games and Oles' Shiskovtsov in particular, who claims it would have been impractical to retrofit the X-ray engine with console support). 4A Engine features Nvidia PhysX support, enhanced AI, and a console SDK for Xbox 360. The PC version includes exclusive features such as DirectX 11 support and has been described as “a love letter to PC gamers” because of the developers' choice to “make the PC version [especially] phenomenal”.

We tested Metro 2033 at the native 1080p resolution of our Panasonic 600hz Plasma Television. DX11, 16af with AAA. We benchmarked with in-game ‘very high' settings as well as ‘medium'.

Testing Metro with all the eye candy cranked at 1080p proves an issue for all the cards on test today with the HD5850 putting in the best showing. It is still reasonably unplayable however so we turned down the settings to ‘normal' within the in game panels. Doing so results in a much more playable experience for both the HD 5850 and the GTX465 – both cards remain playable throughout most of our testing area with only occasional dips into sub 25fps. We recorded a section of gameplay with the GTX 465 at normal settings with the same 1080p resolution.

The results, considering the high resolution are very impressive for the GTX465 with most of the gameplay hovering between 30-32fps. For a truly immersive experience we would suggest slightly lowering the resolution however.

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