XFX Radeon HD 5970 Black Edition Limited 4GB in CrossFire X Review

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 set up various resolutions and configurations in DX11 mode to find out what was playable … as this engine is extremely demanding.

At 4800×900 with AAA enabled, 4x AF on and settings on HIGH we managed to get the game playable at 4800×900 with two XFX BE HD5970's in CFx. In single card mode the game was juddery in many of the sections and we wouldn't class this as playable. The single reference HD5970 was utterly unplayable at these settings dropping into single digits in a few of the test environments.

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